PART ONE: GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Entrepreneurship
DEFINING ENTREPRENEURSHIP
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IS REALLY more about a state of mind than it is about working for yourself. Itās about being resourceful, itās about problem solving. If you meet people who seem like really good problem solvers, step back, and youāll see that they are self-reliant.
āInc., April 1, 2004
A BEGINNERāS MIND
THAT ABILITY TO look at things with a fresh mind, a beginnerās mind, is very useful for entrepreneurs.
āForeign Affairs, January/February 2015
EASY IDEAS, HARD RESULTS
ITāS EASY TO have ideas. Itās very hard to turn an idea into a successful product. There are many steps in between, and it takes persistence.
āEdison Nation video series, April 2011
OVERNIGHT SUCCESSES
Iāve noticed all overnight successes take about 10 years.
āInternet Association charity gala, May 2, 2017
THE INITIAL BUSINESS PLAN
WRITING THE BUSINESS plan, the initial hiring, getting the company incorporated. In a way theyāre sort of, you know, simple, almost pedestrian tasks. But thatās how you start, one step at a time.
āAmerican Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001
MAINTAINING OPTIMISM
MY WIFE SAYS, āIf Jeff is unhappy, wait three minutes.ā I believe that optimism is an essential quality for doing anything hardāentrepreneurial endeavors or anything else. That doesnāt mean that youāre blind or unrealistic, it means that you keep focused on eliminating your risks, modifying your strategy, until it is a strategy about which you can be genuinely optimistic.
āInc., April 1, 2004
BE REALISTIC WITH YOUR BUSINESS
YOU CANāT SIT down to write a business plan and say youāre going to build a multibillion-dollar corporation; thatās unrealistic. A good entrepreneur has a business idea that they believe they can make work at a much more reasonable scale and then proceeds adaptively from there, depending on what happens.
āForeign Affairs, January/February 2015
ITāS VERY IMPORTANT for entrepreneurs to be realistic. And so if you believe on that first day, while youāre writing the business plan, that thereās a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. I mean, itās sort of like, I donāt have any doubt about whether weāre going to fail. Thatās the likely outcome. And it just is. And to pretend that itās not will lead you to do strange and, you know, unnatural things.
āAmerican Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001
WHAT TO DO WITH EARLY INVESTMENTS
WHAT YOU DO with those early, precious capital resources, is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk.
āAmerican Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001
BE STUBBORN AND FLEXIBLE
THE TRICK TO being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. And my rule of thumb on that is to be stubborn on the big things and very flexible on the details.
āWiredās Disruptive by Design, June 15, 2009
PROFESSIONAL SWASHBUCKLING
Without professionalism, swashbuckling just gets you killed.
āVanity Fair New Establishment Summit, October 20, 2016
HOW? WHAT? WHO?
WHEN YOU START out, itās a one-person thing, at least on the first day, and youāre not only figuring out what to do but actually doing it. At a certain point the company gets bigger, and you get to where youāre mostly figuring out what to do but not how itās done. Eventually you get to the point where youāre mostly figuring out who is going to do it, not even what to do. So one way to think about this is as a transition of questions, from āHow?ā to āWhat?ā to āWho?ā
āHarvard Business Review, October 2007
LASER FOCUS
START-UP COMPANIES NEED to be absolutely laser-focused, you know. So many start-up companies I seeāand I talk to entrepreneurs and I see themāthey have too many things going at once. And itās really, really important when you have these initial precious resources, and theyāre so very finite, that you need to be very focused.
ā92nd Street Y in New York City, April 11, 2001
START-UPS NEED LUCK
I BELIEVE THAT all start-up companies require huge amounts of luck.
āCharlie Rose, June 28, 2000
THERE ARE A lot of entrepreneurs. There are a lot of people who are very smart, very hardworking. Very few ever have, you know, the planetary alignment that leads to a tiny little company growing into something substantial. So that requires not only a lot of planning, a lot of hard work, a big team of people who are all dedicated, but it also requires that not only the planets align, but that, you know, you get a few galaxies in there aligning, too.
āAmerican Academy of Achievement interview, May 4, 2001
THE DANGER OF MANAGERS
ONE OF THE differences between, sort of, founder/entrepreneurs and professional managers is that, you know, founder/entrepreneurs are stubborn about the vision and keep working on the details. And, you know, I think one of the dangers of bringing in professional managers to companies at times is that, if somethingās not working, the first thing they do is change the vision, and usually thatās not the right thing to do.
āWiredās Disruptive by Design, June 15, 2009
VISION TRIAGE
ONCE YOU HAVE the big vision, youāll see that within it there are hundreds of smaller ones, and you need the ability to do brutal triage, to be able to say, āNo, we donāt do this, that, and that; weāre going to focus exclusively on these three things.ā
āSuccess, July 1998
PART ONE: GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Business Principles
KNOW THE OBVIOUS
Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.
āWired, November 13, 2011
LOOKING FOR ANSWERS
IF YOU ONLY do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.
āEsquire, September 25, 2008
STICK TO THE STRATEGY
AT THE END of the day, you donāt change your strategy because certain audiences donāt understand it.
āWiredās Disruptive by Design, June 15, 2009
BE A MISSIONARY
I STRONGLY BELIEVE that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, itās not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but thatās not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.
āFortune, June 29,...