BILLIONAIRE WISDOM

8 Insights From The World’s Most Effective Entrepreneurs

Exponential technology allows us to scale up like never before. Small groups can have huge impacts. A team of passionate innovators can alter the lives of a billion people in an eyeblink.

To say that this kind of impact is unfathomable is putting it mildly.

A quartet of entrepreneurs have harnessed exponential technology to build multibillion-dollar companies that forever changed the world:

Elon Musk

Richard Branson

JeffBezos

LarryPage

Each of these entrepreneurs mastered a rarely discussed skill fundamental to bold pursuits and exponential entrepreneurship:

THE ABILITY TO THINK AT SCALE

Humans don’t grok scale. Our brains evolved to process a simpler world, where everything we encountered was local and linear. Yet these four men have pushed through the limitations of linear thinking, and understanding their strategies for thinking at scale can help us do the same.

Entrepreneurs have a high tolerance for risk. But, having said that, one of the most important phrases in my life is ‘protect the downside.’ It should be one of the most important phrases in any businessperson’s life. So okay, we made a big, bold move going into the airline business. But the most important negotiation with Boeing was that we had the right to give the plane back after twelve months. That meant I could put my toe in the water, I could see

whether people liked the airline. But if it didn’t work out, it wasn’t going to bring everything else crashing down. I’d be able to look my record company bosses in the eye and we’d still be friends because they’d still have jobs. Protecting the downside is critical. Make bold moves but make sure to have a way out if things go wrong. SI

R RI

CHA

RD

BRANSON

RISK TAKING & RISK MITIGATIONLEARN THE VALUE OF EACH STRATEGY

Failure comes part and parcel with invention. It’s not optional...We understand that and believe in failing early and iterating until we get it right.

When this process works, it means our failures are relatively small in size (most experiments can start small), and when we hit on something that is really working for customers, we double down on it with hopes to turn it into an even bigger success.JE

FF B

EZOS

RAPIDLY ITERATE AND CEASELESSLY EXPERIMENT UNTIL YOU GET IT RIGHT

BE DRIVEN BY PASSION & PURPOSE

I didn’t go into the rocket business, the car business, or the solar business thinking this is a great opportunity. I just thought, in order to make a difference, something needed to be done. I wanted to have an

impact. I wanted to create something substantially better than what came before.EL

ON

MUSK

We always try to concentrate on the long term...When we first looked at YouTube, people said, ‘Oh, you guys are never going to make money with that, but you bought it for $1.4

billion. You’re totally crazy.’ And, you know, we were reasonably crazy, but it was a good bet. We’ve actually been doubling revenue on YouTube every year for four years. And if you’re doubling things, no matter where you start from, it starts to add up pretty quickly. Our philosophy is that the things that people use often are really important to them and we think that over time, you can make money from those things.

LARR

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GETHINK LONG-TERM

Unless you’re customer-centric you might be able to create something wonderful, but you’re not going to survive. It’s about getting every little detail right. It is running your airline like you would an upscale restaurant—the kind where the owner is there every day. Virgin Atlantic started out with one plane against British Airways’ hundred planes. On paper, we should not have survived. But

because we were customer-centric, people went out of their way to fly us. We have survived for thirty years, during which almost every single airline that we were competed against—Pan Am, TWA, Air Florida, People’s Express, Laker Airways, British Caledonian, and about twenty others—went bust.SI

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BRANSON

EMPHASIZE A CUSTOMER-CENTRIC APPROACH

Outcomes are usually not deterministic, they’re probabilistic. But we don’t think that way. The popular definition of insanity—doing

the same thing over and over & expecting a different result—that’s only true in a highly deterministic situation. If you have a probabilistic situation, which most situations are, then if you do the same thing twice, it can be quite reasonable to expect a different result.EL

ON M

USK

BROADEN YOUR VIEW BY THINKING IN PROBABILITIES

BE A RATIONAL OPTIMIST

I’m tremendously optimistic. I’m certain that whatever challenges we take on, we can solve with a little bit of concerted effort and some good technology. And

that’s an exciting place to be. [It means] our job is really to make the world better. We need more people working on this. We need to have more ambitious goals. The world has enough resources to provide a good quality of life for everyone. We have enough raw materials. We need to get better organized and move a lot faster.LA

RRY P

AGE

[People] will do things because others are doing them, because there is a trend, because they see everyone moving in one

direction and decide that’s the best direction to go. Sometimes this is correct, but sometimes this will take you right off a cliff. Thinking in [fundamental truths] protects you from these errors.

RELIANCE ON FUNDAMENTAL

TRUTHS

ELON

MUS

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Discover the exponential technologies enabling people who want to GO BIG, CREATE WEALTH, AND IMPACT THE WORLD.

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Discover the exponential technologies enabling people who want to GO BIG, CREATE WEALTH, AND IMPACT THE WORLD.