“You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” —Morpheus, in The Matrix As I grow older, I sometimes imagine how my entrepreneurial drive will change when […]
View Post Alice In Wonderland, Chick-fil-A, Morpheus, Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize, The Matrix, Truett Cathy, Wealth: Is It Worth It?
I hate competition. —Marat Safin, tennis champion, Russian politician When entrepreneurs approach me to invest in their companies, I naturally want to know who their competitors are. It’s a basic question that any investor would ask. Some entrepreneurs answer the question thoroughly and confidently. They are not afraid to acknowledge what the competitive landscape looks […]
View Post Blockbuster, Harvard University, Marat Safin, N. Gregory Mankiw, Netflix
Ideas are easy. It’s the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats. —Sue Grafton, author I hate to rain on your parade, but your idea is not special. There are likely other entrepreneurs or companies with “your” idea, equally inspired to dominate the business world and to make millions. And when your […]
View Post Atlanta, Grand Canyon, Groupon, Harvard University, LinkedIn, Mark Zuckerberg, MSNBC.com, Noam Wasserman, Reid Hoffman, Silicon Valley, Sue Grafton
No business plan survives first contact with a customer. —Steve Blank, Silicon Valley–based retired serial entrepreneur. After conjuring up a brilliant business idea, I would immediately start writing a business plan. Like a skilled magician, I could make a marvelous business plan appear before your eyes in just a few days. It would be complete […]
View Post Arthur M. Blank, Babson College, Business Plan, Competitive Landscape, Customer Service, Entrepreneur Magazine, Feasibility Study, Frankenplans, Prototype, Strategy
Two heads are better than one. —John Heywood, English playwright. One of my favorite events in the Summer Olympic Games is the 4×100 meter relay. In this event, a team runs 400 meters total, once around a regulation athletics track, with four teammates running 100 meters each. Currently, Jamaica holds the world record time of […]
View Post Bill Gates, Eduardo Saverin, Fear, Google, Greed, Jamaica, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Johnson, Olympic Games, Olympics, OmniPublisher, Paul Allen, Pride, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Track & Field, Usain Bolt, World Record, Yohan Blake
Competition is very good. . . . It’s what makes one strive to be better. —Christine Lahti, actress, film director. Ninety-five percent of the time, arrogance leads entrepreneurs to believe that they have no competition in the marketplace. However, on rare occasions, arrogance isn’t the true cause of this belief. Instead, arrogance is an effect […]
View Post Back to the Future, Contrave, DeLorean, FDA, Food and Drug Administration, New York Times, Orexigen Therapeutics, Road and Track, Segway, Zipcar
Timid salesmen have skinny kids. —Zig Ziglar, author, motivational speaker Reality hit us like a Mack truck and stopped us dead in our tracks. Although we reached our goal of creating OmniPublisher, one of the first content management systems built specifically for newspapers and other periodicals, we realized that we forgot to include the most […]
View Post Apple, Eduardo Saverin, Facebook, George Cloutier, Goldman Sachs, Mack Truck, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix, OmniPublisher, Pandora, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Twitter, Webvan, Zig Ziglar
Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets. —Steve Jobs, cofounder, Apple As a sophomore in college, I cofounded a Latin jazz band called Río Negro with a Puerto Rican friend of mine who played congas. We loved everything about Latin music and […]
View Post Apple, Atlanta, Bill Clinton, Latin Jazz, Rio Negro, Steve Jobs, Super Bowl
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. —Henry Ford, founder, Ford Motor Company. The two kinds of entrepreneurs are those who create markets and those who do not. On the one hand, the entrepreneur who creates markets is considered a revolutionary. On the other hand, the entrepreneur who […]
View Post Amazon.com, Blue Ocean, Blue Ocean Strategy, Cirque du Soleil, College, Forbes, George Lucas, Harvard Business Press, Henry Ford, Jeff Bezos, Lexus, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Dell, Nike, Phil Knight, Profit, Ralph Lauren, Red Ocean, Renée Mauborgne, Revenue, W. Chan Kim, Wall Street