50 Entrepreneurs share priceless advice

do something you're very passionate about and don't try to chase what is kind of the hot Passion of the day people say you you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true and the reason is uh is because it's so hard that if you don't any rational person would give up it's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time so if you don't love it if you're not having fun doing it you don't really love it uh you're going to give up so

just go and do it try learn from it you you know you'll fail at some things that's a learning experience that you need so that you can take that onto the next experience um and don't let people who you may respect uh and who you believe know what they're talking about don't let them tell you it can't be done because often they will tell you it can't be done and uh it's just cuz they don't have the courage to try I think people that look for great ideas to make money uh you know aren't nearly

as as successful as those who say okay what do I really love to do what am I excited about what do I know something about you know what's kind of interesting and compelling it's uh very rewarding when you work on something you think is going to make a big difference and uh yeah it's a little bit harder but I think uh I think the passion that one might bring with it uh brings so much more energy to that that you're more likely to succeed you have to have an emotional investment in what you're doing if

you don't love what you're doing um failure is pretty much guaranteed Success is Not Guaranteed by any means but failure is much more likely if you don't love what you're doing if you know exactly what you want to be you need to spend as much time with people that are actually that already you know one of the things that I do is I question a lot of things um and you can do that in a good way and a bad way but hopefully if you try to get people to motivate why they're doing something and

their way of thinking you know the worst thing you can end up with is a situation where um you get told well this is the way it's always been that's the worst ever that's a non-answer instead ask yourself you know given everything we have today is there a way we can make this better and so when we're coming up with ideas you know we always ask ourselves um what kind of New Market is this creating and then also what what part of my day and and what problem is it solving and so I've gone as

far as taking an entire catalog of my day from the moment I like open my eyes and writing down every single thing I do and then asking myself like is there something here if you're not coming up with 10 ideas a day that's why I have this thing if I'm not coming up if I'm not filling up this page every single day then my idea muscle will atrophy and I started this in 2001 and I still do it every single day like you have to come up with ideas every single day or the idea muscle

atrophies the good news is after about six months of doing that you're like a machine like people get surprised at how many ideas you could just have anywhere but understand that naturally nobody is interested in your idea the world could care less and you have to persuade them and you have to show that you're the one person out there that can do it when it comes to changing the world what I learned from Steve Jobs is if you believe in a Macintosh if you believe in iPhone iPod iPad if you believe enough then you will

see it because other people will believe in it other people will create software other people will create products so you need to Foster the belief in what you are dreaming so that it becomes a reality which is very different than saying I don't expect anybody to believe it until I see it you need people to believe it before they can see it don't necessarily think that you have to have the home run and the huge Apple computer on your first start I spent a long time in my life with skills just building little devices for

fun for fun is one of the key things because that drives you to think and think and think and make it better and better and better than you ever would if you're doing it for a company build things at first for yourself that you would want for somebody aspiring to you know take things to the next level or to even surpass their Wildest Dreams there's always going to have to be an element of luck but I think more important is putting yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous that that can that really doesn't have

limits because otherwise there's always going to be a grind to it but if if the business if if if it can't be something that you can visualize every business using or every consumer using it's going to be tough to scale to be big enough or to have the perceived value you want an idea about what you can say I know it sounds like a bad idea but here's specifically why it's actually a great one you want to sound crazy but you want to actually be right cuz when you're trying to differentiate when you're trying to

do something different there's going to be that gut moment that gut sense is this right is this not right if you're not if you're not having doubt you're not pushing the boundaries far enough don't think about how do I get really how I get big fast that will happen if you actually build something super meaningful and super important so don't think about you know what is the quickest way to success think about what is the best way to building something important that the world really needs this little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders

are able to inspire where others aren't let me Define the terms really quickly every single person every single organization on the planet knows what they do 100% some know how they do it whether you call it your differentiating value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP but very very few people or organizations know why they do what they do and by why I don't mean to make a profit that's a result it's always a result by why I mean what's your purpose what's your cause what's your belief why does your organization exist so when

we see a kid with a lemonade stand it's different than when we see a vending machine spelling lemonade even if it's exactly the same product cuz the story around it is what people are paying for so when I meet small business people all I ask them is not what's their balance sheet but what's their story why should I pick you why do I care about what you're doing and if you start giving me all this inside baseball statistics about why you're 2% better than some other competitor I'm already glazed over because that's not part of

the way I see the world that I have to want this to exist in the world I I have to not so it's a similar rule just say if this was successful and I had nothing and I got no and I was not involved and I got no money off it or wasn't what I want it to do well and that's a great check I think to know if you really feel good about the idea and can be passionate about it one of the things I advise entrepreneurs to do is when you have an idea

a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not go tell people because oh the idea is so special right that's almost always a mistake go talk to why is that a mistake it's a mistake because your actual real competitive Advantage is not that you have this idea that you have locked away in your closet which may or may not be accurate and you have no idea which it is uh your your actual competitive Advantage is if you're assembling the intelligence around does this idea work what is the right teams what

is the right learnings and we're essentially in motion the hardest thing to do is start um you have all these ideas and everyone has an idea but it's really about executing the idea and building the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea that is the biggest challenge but the the way to begin is to get the idea out of your head draw it out you know um Talk About It program it if you're a programmer or make it if you're building something like you don't have to be the best but

you have to be dangerous right you have to learn just enough to be dangerous to build an idea concept it and show it to the world and then it turns out there are lots of other people including all 170 employees that work at Instagram who are much better at doing all that stuff than I am but you need to find people who can you know be drawn to the idea that you build and and then they end up taking it and um and making it even better you know one way to conceptualize what makes a

good product is you know good engineering is part of it good design is part of it but really it's um one way I think about it is at least is uh maximizing the probability that someone shows up at the front door of you know your store or your website or or whatever it is and ends up with a Sol problem and often times the best methodology is to start with the perfect experience with just one person get that right and then figure out how to scale something great instead of scaling something not so great and

then trying to improve it that's really hard to do and so I think when you are starting a new business you uh you don't want to go after Giant Markets you want to go after small markets and you want to take over those markets quickly constantly seek criticism yeah uh a a well a wellth thought out critique of whatever you're doing is as valuable as gold um and you should seek that from everyone you can but particularly your friends if you're not utilizing an online community then you're at a disadvantage to those who are you

can be asking online communities what they think about your ideas or if they have any advice with what you're working on not only will you hear from people who are passionate about the subject but you'll be hearing from people all around the world each with their own experiences and stories that can help you and there are a lot of people from whom we can learn a lot and I think like you know the one piece of advice is like don't underestimate anyone you come across ever like whether they're you know uh a blue collar worker

waiting for the bus or they're you know helping you at your they're the server bartender at the restaurant or they're a lower ranking employee I mean the smartest leaders I've ever seen have always gone around the room and asked for everybody's opinion most startups that fail Do It ultimately because they did not make something that people wanted they made something that um you know that they thought thought people would want um but they were either in denial about it about you know whether it was actually any good um or somebody else came along and made

something that people wanted even more the best piece of advice that that we've figured out as we've been doing cor square is not to not to let other people distract what you're doing there's always haters that say your idea is stupid this idea is never going to work um don't even bother doing that cuz someone else is going to do it before you do and if we listen to all those all that feedback that we were getting all that negative feedback we would never built things we would never prototype things and that's how we really

got to where we are like we saw things that we wanted to build and we just went out and built them and it turns out when you build stuff that you like to use um there a good chance that there's thousands of other people that want to use it too and so it's not just about doing focus groups it's not just about you know double-checking your vision it really is about integrating this concept of testing our ideas rigorously throughout the product development process throughout the marketing process even as we scale up but what we really

need to do is think about what is the the smallest possible test that I can run for this idea for this concept for this Theory get it out there and get customers using it because your customers are going to be the ones to tell you if it's really working or not like like there's almost this expectation that you have to have in your mind this this sort of I'm going to change the world sort of make a dent in the universe kind of kind of ambition right but it's actually okay early on to just kind

of solve small problems in layers until you actually get to a point where you have the capacity to do that what this all comes down to is doing something exceptional for your users whether it's in community whether it's in connection or whether it's in Design This Is Our Big Advantage as a startup is that we can actually get away with doing this we can make this the core part of why we're doing business I think you should be spending your money on on um on teaching and and sharing and so that might mean hiring a

writer or two perhaps instead of a marketing person you know and start writing and start getting people to listen to what you're saying you can't talk about yourself all the time because no one's going to come back for that but you have to talk about things that are relevant to your industry or ideas that you have and start to build that audience up I do think that one thing that's important is especially if you're a founder or a technical founder is to realize that you can't do everything and even if you can you shouldn't you

should find a great partner no matter what it is that you're doing um and you should look for someone who is very high intelligence uh very high energy and very high integrity and you need all three of those you can't compromise on any one of them otherwise you'll end up with either someone who's not smart which is does you no good or someone who's not hardworking which also does you no good or the worst case is you end up with a smart hardworking crook who ends up working against your interests and uh Integrity is something

that takes a lot of time spent with someone to figure out the most important thing when you're working with people early is that you guys line up on on what your goals are um that's that's really that sounds really basic but you can to totally it can be fine you can want to build a small business um that makes money and you don't have to go to an office every day or you can want to build a huge company you can want to build Google but I think you have to be really really aligned on

that when you a lot of Corporations have they might call them core values or guiding principles or so on but the problem is usually they're very lofty sounding they kind of read like a press release the marketing department put out uh they sound just like they're competitors and maybe you learn about it on day one of your job but then it becomes this meaningless ple on the lobby wall well we wanted to come up with committable core values and by committable meaning we're willing to hire or fire People based on those values uh completely independent

of their actual job performance the definition of values is there the behaviors or principles that you religiously adhere to within your company and when I say religious I mean that no amount of data will sway you in from um from those princip principles and the degree to which that you have the courage to um maintain your conviction around those ideas is the degree to which you're going to be successful over the long term a company is simply a group of people um and uh as a leader of people uh you have to be a great

listener um you have to be a great motivator uh you have to uh be very good at praising and looking for the best in people um you know people are no different from from fly if you water flows they flourish if you um praise people they flourish and um and that's a critical attribute of um of a leader um so I kind of like half jokingly with with a lot of people say that you know my job is basically like to be to be the assistant for the rest of the company like my job is

to to make sure that like you have what you need um that it's and and basically you have everything you need to kick ass like that's my job if you don't have that that then let me know cuz I'm not doing my job you know there are a lot of things that are outside of your control um a lot of external circumstances will depend like determine the success of your idea whether you know the market timing is right for this new kind of service um or whether uh people you know whether a customer like the

econom is right for for for your kind of service right whether um you meet the right people who will finance your company um many many external circumstances are like outside of your control and like but will affect the outcome and you know you have to like be okay with that another quality that I think is important is kind of being flexible minded or open-minded I'm not saying you shouldn't have a you know vision for for your idea or your product but you need to be open to changes so many things go wrong when you're starting

a company and often I think people ask you know what mistakes U should you avoid making and you know my answer to that question is don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you're going to make tons of mistakes right and the the um the important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up right and I mean there there are things every single year of Facebook's existence that could have killed us or made it so that it it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just

seemed intractable but you just kind of bounce back and you learn and um nothing is impossible you just have to kind of keep running through the walls the two things we really zero in on on people are um you know two things they sound simple they end up being very difficult um courage and genius um courage is the one we talk about a lot because it's the one that people can learn um you know courage courage which is to say not giving up in the face of adversity um you know just being absolutely determined to

succeed you know is something that you can you can like force yourself to do it can be very painful you can force yourself to do it the genius part is a little bit hard to force yourself to do um you know courage without genius might not get you where you need to go but genius without courage almost certainly won't and I think the reality uh is just you know not quite So Glamorous there's sort of there's an ugly side to uh being an entrepreneur uh and also just more importantly uh what what you're actually spending

your time on is is just a lot of hard work uh Sam mentioned this but you're basically just sitting at your desk heads down focused um answering customer customer support emails doing sales figuring out hard engineering problems um so it's really important that you kind of like go in with with eyes wide open optimism has a place but I think even more so for the first time entrepreneur you need to be pragmatically pessimistic what I mean by that is you need to Define all of the worst case scenarios in terms of financial loss time loss

Etc look at what you will learn if that happens and accept and come to terms with that before you ever start if you don't do that and you go straight into battling the world trying to conquer the world with rose col glasses on the first time you hit a major hiccup you're going to become really demoralized and you will quit if you don't love it you won't make it through the long period of pain that is inevitable so uh make sure that you take care of yourself during the process make sure that you take care

of uh your mental health your physical health while you're doing it because it's a long road