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My children have been learning lessons about entrepreneurship since they were in kindergarten, and these lessons are paying off: even though they are only 22, 18, and 15, they have already collectively launched three nonprofit organizations and several new businesses.
I believe that entrepreneurs play an unmatched role and the accelerating pace of innovation is transforming the face of global challenges. You must think about the solution differently when you're trying to impact 1 billion people rather than affecting 1 million people.
While most philanthropists tend to flock together and build their teams around friends, family, or others who happen to be retired or with a lot of free time on their hands, a great entrepreneur knows that success is directly related to the quality and talents of their team.
I believe our legacy will be defined by the accomplishments and fearless nature by which our daughters and sons take on the global challenges we face. I also wonder if perhaps the most lasting expression of one's humility lies in our ability to foster and mentor our children.
When your child comes to you at a young age and declares he or she is passionate about this or that, the natural tendency for many parents, out of love, is to simply support that decision. That's the path of least resistance, but it's not necessarily the best path, in my opinion.
What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.
The entrepreneurial bug had already bitten my son Ankur by the time he got to college. As a lifelong entrepreneur, I certainly didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm by telling him he couldn't do it, but I also wanted to make sure it was balanced with the proper attention to his studies.
Trust your gut instinct over spreadsheets. There are too many variables in the real world that you simply can't put into a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets spit out results from your inexact assumptions and give you a false sense of security. In most cases, your heart and gut are still your best guide.
I came to the United States in the early '80s and was welcomed with open arms and given the opportunity to pursue my dreams. God has been very kind to us. My family and I are fortunate enough to be successful and we feel a tremendous responsibility and obligation to give back to our great country.
Philanthropists can learn important lessons from business entrepreneurs. They both spend their time solving problems. And to be successful, they both must overcome physical challenges and create self-sustaining operations. And ultimately, they must allow people to take action for their own benefit.
By understanding and harnessing the forces that drive human behavior, you can create a self-sustaining philanthropic effort that reaches millions of people. It begins with an entrepreneurial attitude: take an idea and execute on that idea. If it doesn't work, learn why and build on what you've learned.
If we want to impact hundreds - or millions - of people, we have to do things differently. If we look at the problem as an infrastructural problem, we cannot make an impact because it requires a lot of effort. But when we convert this problem into a knowledge problem, suddenly the problem is manageable.
Today, people idolize athletes and celebrities - and yes, highly successful and visionary business people like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but not the innovators who perhaps have not seen such high-flying levels of success. Can anyone name the inventors of GPS, which has such a huge impact on our lives today?
Just think of the opportunities we can unlock by making education as addictive as a video game. This type of experiential, addictive learning improves decision-making skills and increases the processing speed and spatial skills of the brain. When was the last time your child asked for help with a video game?
The truth is, what Americans enjoy about football is much of what makes the sport dangerous. However, I believe there must be a way to find the art of success and vitality in football, without the driving the level of impact that causes serious risk of head trauma, paralysis and other life-changing injuries.
Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business.
Don’t wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. Launching gives you real, solid feedback, instead of the imaginary “what if” scenarios dreamed up in a conference room.
As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.
Don't wallow in brainstorming. Time spent fiddling with a business plan or filling up whiteboards with ideas is time that you could spend actually launching your business and seeing if the idea floats. Launching gives you real, solid feedback, instead of the imaginary 'what if' scenarios dreamed up in a conference room.
Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing. This focus and intensity helps to eliminate wasted effort and distractions. Most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation, i.e. companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things very well.
Great entrepreneurs focus intensely on an opportunity where others see nothing. This focus and intensity helps to eliminate wasted effort and distractions. Most companies die from indigestion rather than starvation, i.e., companies suffer from doing too many things at the same time rather than doing too few things very well.
Many of the problems of poverty and need are really problems of physical infrastructure: not enough hospitals, too few schools, insufficient roads, bridges, and a lack of tools. This is what makes traditional philanthropy so daunting. You could build a thousand new hospitals in some parts of the world and barely make a difference.
I started off with a company, InfoSpace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy.
As a father, I believe that involving children in sports at a young age is generally, a wise proposition. I believe that healthy competition is... well... healthy; that sporting events foster a spirit of teamwork that far surpasses the events themselves; and that active participation keeps children moving and is good for their self-esteem.
Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up. Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business had failed to catch fire.
When I finally had the chance to make my childhood dream a reality - as a co-founder and chairman of Moon Express - my goal was to broaden participation in lunar exploration, and connect the common person to its results. We plan to send robotic rovers - not humans - to the Moon to search for precious metals and rare minerals on the Moon's surface.