In this exclusive interview series, we speak to some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs: Sir Richard Branson (Founder of Virgin Group), Robin Li (Founder of Baidu), Sir James Dyson (Founder of Dyson), Professor Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Founder of Grameen Bank), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Founder of Biocon), N. R. Narayana Murthy (Founder of Infosys) Tim Draper (Founding Partner, Draper Associates and DFJ), Jamal Edwards MBE (Founder, SBTV), Nathan Myhrvold (Founder & CEO, Intellectual Ventures), Wendy Kopp (CEO & Co-Founder, Teach For All), Tory Burch (Chairman & CEO, Tory Burch), Steve Case (Co-Founder, America Online – AOL & Revolution), Jerry Yang (Co-Founder, Yahoo!), Tony O. Elumelu (Chairman of Heirs Holdings, the United Bank for Africa, Transcorp and founder of The Tony Elumelu Foundation), Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups), David Cohen (Co-Founder, Techstars), Ricardo Salinas (Founder & Chairman, Grupo Salinas),Vladimir Potanin (Founder & President, Interros), Gary Vaynerchuk (Founder, VaynerMedia), Troy Carter (Founder & CEO, Atom Factory), Dr. Michael Otto (Chairman, Otto Group), Jack Welch (Former CEO of GE and Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch Management Institute), Naveen Jain (Founder of InfoSpace, Intelius, Moon Express and Blue dot), Weili Dai (Co-Founder, Marvell Technology Group), Steve Ballmer (Co-Chair of Ballmer Group & Owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA Basketball Team), will.i.am (Entrepreneur, Entertainer and Innovator), Donna Karan (Founder of DKNY and Urban Zen), Laurence Graff OBE (Founder & Chairman, Graff Diamonds), John Caudwell (Entrepreneur & Philanthropist), Dr. Frederik Paulsen, JR (Chairman, Ferring Pharmaceuticals), Thor Björgólfsson (Founding Chairman, Novator), Kanya King MBE (Founder, MOBO Organisation), Dennis Crowley (Co-Founder, Foursquare), Kevin O’Leary (Shark Tank), John Sculley (CEO of Apple from 1983-1993), Alfred Lin (Partner, Sequoia Capital & Former Chairman, Zappos) and Stewart Butterfield (Co-Founder, SLACK). ] We look at the characteristics of great entrepreneurs, how some of the world’s most successful companies have succeeded, and discuss wealth, philanthropy and the realities of business in a global economy.

“…Over 28% of all the ‘history’ made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century.” noted the Economist in June 2011, adding “… Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already ‘longer’ than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010…” Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt also notes that, “…every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.”

The evident growth in humankind led early economists such as Thomas Malthus to foresee a future of doom for our burgeoning civilisation. “Extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics… and gigantic inevitable famine…” were considered near-certain as a result of an increase in human density on our planet. The truth is that Malthus (and his counterparts) were (largely) wrong. While the astonishing growth of our species’ numbers over the past century has come at a heavy price (resulting in hunger, conflict and more)- it has also delivered incredible economic and social growth. As at July 2015, the combined market capitalisation of the 10 largest companies in the world was US$3.65 trillion- the equivalent of around 2.7x the size of the entire world economy in 1960 (and less than 5% of the world economy today).

“When conjectures are offered to explain historic slowdowns or great leaps in economic growth, there is the group of usual suspects that is regularly rounded up-prominent among them, the entrepreneur. Where growth has slowed, it is implied that a decline in entrepreneurship was partly to blame (perhaps because the culture’s ‘need for achievement’ has atrophied). At another time and place, it is said, the flowering of entrepreneurship accounts for unprecedented expansion.” (Baumol, 1990) There is historic precedent for this… “From the fall of Rome (circa 476 AD) to the eighteenth century, there was virtually no increase in per capita income in the West. However, with the advent of entrepreneurship, per capita income grew exponentially in the West by 20% in the 1700s, 200% in the 1800s, and 740% in the 1900s…” (Murphy, 2006).

Conservative estimates state that over 400 million people in 54 countries are actively engaged in entrepreneurship- (loosely defined as starting and running new businesses). This figure doesn’t include the (potentially) hundreds of millions more engaged in forms of pseudo-entrepreneurship in science, medicine and politics- their contributions no-less important to our society’s economic, social and intellectual growth.

So what is the role of entrepreneurship in society, economy and the story of our civilisation?

In this exclusive interview series, we speak to Sir Richard Branson (Founder of Virgin Group), Robin Li (Founder of Baidu), Sir James Dyson (Founder of Dyson), Professor Muhammad Yunus (Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Founder of Grameen Bank), Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw (Founder of Biocon), N. R. Narayana Murthy (Founder of Infosys), Tim Draper (Founding Partner, Draper Associates & DFJ), Jamal Edwards MBE (Founder, SBTV), Nathan Myhrvold (Founder & CEO, Intellectual Ventures), Wendy Kopp (CEO & Co-Founder, Teach for All), Tory Burch (Chairman & CEO, Tory Burch), Steve Case (Co-Founder, America Online – AOL & Revolution), Jerry Yang (Co-Founder, Yahoo!), Tony O. Elumelu (Chairman of Heirs Holdings, the United Bank for Africa, Transcorp and founder of The Tony Elumelu Foundation), Dave McClure (Founder, 500 Startups), David Cohen (Co-Founder, Techstars), Ricardo Salinas (Founder & Chairman, Grupo Salinas) Vladimir Potanin (Founder & President, Interros), Gary Vaynerchuk (Founder, VaynerMedia), Troy Carter (Founder & CEO, Atom Factory), Dr. Michael Otto (Chairman, Otto Group), Jack Welch (Former CEO of GE and Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch Management Institute), Naveen Jain (Founder of InfoSpace, Intelius, Moon Express and Blue dot), Weili Dai (Co-Founder, Marvell Technology Group), Steve Ballmer (Co-Chair of Ballmer Group & Owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA Basketball Team), will.i.am (Entrepreneur, Entertainer and Innovator), Donna Karan (Founder of DKNY and Urban Zen), Laurence Graff OBE (Founder & Chairman, Graff Diamonds), John Caudwell (Entrepreneur & Philanthropist), Dr. Frederik Paulsen, JR (Chairman, Ferring Pharmaceuticals), Thor Björgólfsson (Founding Chairman, Novator), Kanya King MBE (Founder, MOBO Organisation), Dennis Crowley (Co-Founder, Foursquare), Kevin O’Leary (Shark Tank), John Sculley (CEO of Apple from 1983-1993), Alfred Lin (Partner, Sequoia Capital & Former Chairman, Zappos) and Stewart Butterfield (Co-Founder, SLACK). We look at the characteristics of great entrepreneurs, how some of the world’s most successful companies have succeeded, and discuss wealth, philanthropy and the realities of business in a global economy.

Q: What does ‘entrepreneurship’ mean to you?

[Robin Li] Entrepreneurship means a constant willingness to keep learning. It’s about maintaining that start-up spirit—where you’re forever young, and forever in crisis. It’s about always having your mind on the business: Lying in bed and constantly asking yourself, “What should I do?”

[Sir James Dyson] Perhaps it stems from a desire to be competitive. I have always enjoyed long distance running, reaching the pain barrier and driving through it.

I have always been fascinated with how things work and how I can make them better. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t building something. Solving problems has been my life’s work, from my first job working with my mentor Jeremy Fry to founding Dyson. This spirit is something that I look for in every new starter at Dyson. People who want to solve problems and aren’t afraid to take risks and try new ways of doing something.

[Professor Muhammad Yunus] I always felt I can do something to solve people’s problems. Even if it is solving the problem of one person. It always excites me to let my small steps grow, and then while one is growing, I get thrilled taking the first small step for the next venture.

While entrepreneurship is in every human being, economic theories recommended a very absurd prescription. They visioned a world where people should be working in companies, factories, fields, and offices, for salary. They downgraded human beings enormously. As a result a world emerged where people forgot their natural quality of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship was buried deep inside of people’s consciousness. They are made to believe their life depends on getting a job. Without job, you are a failure.

[Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw] Nowadays, people may think of entrepreneurship from an early age; but it’s not something you’re born with… not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur from when they’re born! It’s a set of circumstances that mould you into an entrepreneur. There are stories of many people who have dropped out of the education system, and then think, “now what can we do?”

There are some traits you need to be an entrepreneur for sure, and that sets you apart. You need to take risks, take challenges, be willing to stick it out, be willing to understand failure. These are the traits of entrepreneurs, but the process of becoming an entrepreneur is often about circumstances.

[Tim Draper] Entrepreneurship drives change and change allows us to progress as society. In my career, I have learned that anything is possible if a single driven entrepreneur has a vision and the drive to make it a reality. I have enjoyed an amazing career in venture capital with Draper Associates/DFJ and entrepreneurs have really made amazing things happen from free communication worldwide (Hotmail and Skype) to electric cars (Tesla), to digitized music and design (Digidesign and Parametric) to a Chinese search tool (Baidu) to a two drop, fifty result blood test (Theranos). I can’t even imagine the world without these things today.

[Jamal Edwards] Entrepreneurship is about innovation. If there’s something out there, how do you make it better? Or how do you create your own business. An entrepreneur is someone who keeps on trying and isn’t bogged down if they fail.

I watched a lady talk about nurtured versus natured entrepreneurs. You can be an entrepreneur in many forms. When I used to work at Top Man (I worked there for 4 years) I was always looking at new ways to get people to sign-up to store-cards and whatnot. I was an entrepreneur in my job, even though I was employed by someone else! Everyone said to me before that entrepreneurs are not employees, but employers…. But it’s not about that, it’s about how you conduct yourself in business, whatever your business is.

When I left Top Man, I became a natured entrepreneur. I set up my own business, which I run now, SBTV.

[Nathan Myhrvold] Entrepreneurs are people who are not satisfied with the existing order of things and take it upon themselves to create something new. Typically, we think of this in a business context, of people who start new companies, but the core of entrepreneurship is affecting change by creating something new. There are entrepreneurs in a generalized sense in all sorts of different fields, but there are people who really make a difference by creating a brand new idea and typically an organization around that idea that can put it to effect.

[Wendy Kopp] I didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur, but I had a passion for an idea that didn’t exist and I had the naiveté and the confidence that I could make it happen. I discovered that I really enjoy the entrepreneurial journey and all the learning, energy, and resourcefulness it requires.

[Tony O. Elumelu] For me, personally, being an entrepreneur is an innate talent, as well as a learned one. My mother owned restaurants and was a major distributor in the consumer value chain. So, growing up, I was able to see firsthand the far-reaching value that entrepreneurship creates. Now that I am a seasoned professional, entrepreneurship has come to mean many things to me: as a businessperson, entrepreneurship has enabled me to create wealth, for myself, my investors, my colleagues and stakeholders. Entrepreneurship has also created an avenue for me to impact humanity positively, by creating and supporting more entrepreneurs, through the Tony Elumelu Foundation. Entrepreneurship has empowered me to raise the standard of living for entire communities, particularly on my continent – Africa.

[Dave McClure] An entrepreneur is someone who’s hustling to creating a new business, solve problems, create jobs and create economic benefits for society.

[David Cohen] Entrepreneurship is highly synonymous with creativity and relates to ideas such as making a positive change in the world and, of course, wealth. I don’t mean wealth in the ‘get rich’ sense, but rather well-being.

[Ricardo Salinas] The problem of business is the business of solving problems. However, this is not the only contribution of entrepreneurship. My friend David Konzevik often says that “an entrepreneur is an economic agent willing to take uninsurable risks.” In a world of ever increasing risks, entrepreneurs are now more important than ever. This is especially true in countries such as Mexico where there is more uncertainty, especially today. Entrepreneurs do more with less, develop ideas that improve the well-being of people around the world, generate wealth, create jobs and boost living conditions.

[Vladimir Potanin] Before I started my business, I worked for the government for ten years. My father also worked for the government – it was a dynasty of sorts. To be fair, let me say that the USSR’s Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations was the most market-oriented of all of the Soviet government institutions because it was responsible for trade with foreign countries. We led commercial negotiations, drafted contracts, and concluded deals. Working there gave me a certain foundation. Still, I consider the day in 1990 when I left the Ministry – when I made that final decision to go into business on my own – my shining moment. I decided to believe in myself, in my own abilities. Few had it in them to do what I did: I had to overcome the gravitational pull, figuratively speaking.

Today, business is a part of my life. There is a good rule to follow: do not change your own moral precepts, do not do anything that you wouldn’t do under regular circumstances. Some may think that in business you have to follow different rules – that it is OK in business to act differently from how you would act in daily life. My experiences show that this is not the case.

In terms of my business profile, I have always worked in private equity. I don’t do well with greenfield projects; I have less of a feel for them. But I do have business intuition for projects that involve restructuring existing companies to make them more effective, more interesting. It is easier for me to bring new ideas and formulate new approaches in a venture that previously functioned differently.

[Dr. Michael Otto] To me personally, entrepreneurship means to be as well creative as analytical. It means also the highest degree of professional freedom, combined with a very high awareness of one’s responsibility for one’s own actions and a high degree of personal risk. Throughout my whole life I have dedicated myself to identifying market opportunities early, taking these opportunities and implementing them in a profitable way. This still fires my enthusiasm today!

[Troy Carter] Entrepreneurship is a way of life.

For me, entrepreneurship has always been about being a builder. Whether it’s about undiscovered artists or working with companies pre-launch, the build process is what attracts me.

Look at the way our communities and countries have been built; a lot of it is just a bunch of entrepreneurs who have had great ideas.

Entrepreneurship is- I think- part of the core of who I am.

[Naveen Jain] Most people think of entrepreneurs as someone who starts a company, but to me? Entrepreneurship is really about problem solving.

People can (roughly) be divided into three categories. The first category are people who can tell you all the problems in the world! ‘here is a pothole someone should fix,’ ‘here is a path someone should take!,’ ‘why isn’t someone doing something about this?’ – the second group of people are those who invent, innovate and find solutions to these problems. The third group, entrepreneurs, are those people who don’t talk about the problem or solution but go out and solve it.

You can be an entrepreneur in a company, in a family or in your own venture. The bottom line? If you can solve a problem – you’re an entrepreneur.

[Weili Dai] As entrepreneurs must have business in your DNA in a way, so how do I see Entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs must thrive, entrepreneurs must believe in themselves, they have to be confident and they also have a good purpose. What do I mean by purpose? Well, Entrepreneurs must have vision and determination and to change the world for the better.

[Will.I.Am] Entrepreneurship is the relentless drive to carry-on, no matter what. Entrepreneurship is tolerance, focus and dedication. Entrepreneurship is this ‘true north’ belief that whatever this ‘thing’ is that you want to bring to culture, that you will see it through… and that you are the one here to usher it into existence.

For me, entrepreneurship is about the people that I surround myself.

At iam plus, the company I founded, we have offices in Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Bangalore (India), Singapore and now Shenzhen (China). There’s around 150 of us, and we’re growing. We’re a cross-disciplinary think-tank company and have everything from AI developers, OS developers, hardware developers and content-makers.

That keeps me on my toes, keeps me thinking- and I can help to edit, fine tune and work on getting those things we work on to be adopted.

[Donna Karan] I’ve been an entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. It just came naturally to me, and I never gave it a label as being an entrepreneur. When I was 15, I rearranged the sales floor in the boutique I was working in and was the best salesperson in the store. At 25, when my boss Anne Klein died, I took over designing and changed the look of the collection to make it younger and sexier, and also changed how it was shown and sold in the showroom – not to mention just having had a baby while all this was happening. Ten years later, I set out to create a small company to make clothes for me and my friends, a Seven Easy Pieces system of dressing, which turned into Donna Karan New York and then Donna Karan International. And just a few years after that, I wanted a pair of jeans to flatter a woman’s body and to dress my teenaged daughter. That desire turned into DKNY, a global company that introduced fast fashion to the world. Now I’m focusing on Urban Zen, a marriage of commerce and philosophy where I can address as well as dress the consumer. In each and every case I took action based on a personal desire. I wasn’t thinking about success or being ‘big’ or creating a huge business. I was thinking about answering a need, a void, creating something that wasn’t there before.

[Laurence Graff] I observed entrepreneurial spirit from a very early age living in London’s East End. It was during the war; I observed business men and women seizing opportunity and making the best of a very difficult time. It taught me to always keep my eyes and ears open, to always see the light in every situation.

[John Caudwell] In line with most highly-tuned talents, I absolutely believe that entrepreneurship is a genetic gift that you’re born with. What you do with that gift depends on your upbringing, opportunities and inspirations; you either make them massively better or neglect them.

If you don’t have those genetic talents from birth, it’s difficult to be really, really, successful. For anybody to get to the top of anything- whether that’s a 100-metre sprint or business, you have to be genetically gifted and then work like fury to achieve. That combination of genetics and sheer hard work is the ‘secret’ of getting to the top.

Let me be clear however, I don’t want anyone to be misled into thinking that without that genetic gift they will not be successful! That’s clearly wrong. You may be born without any gift at all, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work very, very hard and get to the top. That genetic-gift factor is the difference between being good, and being a world champion. You’re never going to be a world champion runner, cyclist or entrepreneur without it.

[Frederik Paulsen] Today, entrepreneurship is fashionable, it’s something you can develop in your character and strengthen. I’m not so sure… I believe that entrepreneurship is something you’re born with, or not.

I’ve met many highly intelligent, and incredibly bright people who have not been able to develop their ideas into sensible businesses.

Entrepreneurship is not related to intelligence, it’s something you have or don’t have.

Entrepreneurs are part of the broad continuum of people who want to break out of the ‘ordinary’ and challenge the perceived ‘truths’ in society. They are more provocative, they believe passionately in their own ideas.

[Thor Björgólfsson] I’m from a small seafaring country where people go out and make a living as fishermen; going out and taking risks to bring home an income is part of our DNA. We live by what we catch!

Iceland has a strong work ethic. I got my first job at the age of 12 running errands and delivering papers, I always had a job or two alongside being at school. In Iceland, the culture is such that you start making your way in life at a very early age.

As I approached my 20’s, I realised that instead of working for a salary- it’s better to work for something where you get a percentage of the outcome, or where there’s some risk involved.

[Kanya King] Entrepreneurship is about taking risks and having the audacity to commit and persevere through all the obstacles and hurdles we have to overcome.

[John Sculley] Entrepreneurship means the unrelenting belief that there has to be a better way.

There has to be a better way of doing things… I learned that back in my early days when we were creating Pepsi’s marketing campaign against the giant Coca Cola. I learned it when we were starting PepsiCo’s international snack foods business (now the largest part of its business). I learned it many times at Apple, and again and again since.

If it was obvious that things were already being done in a great way that couldn’t be improved? There wouldn’t be any need for entrepreneurs to step-in and create new ways of doing things that don’t rely on the baggage of the past.

Entrepreneurs are people who by nature are optimists, who can tolerate risk and who have huge curiosity.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly going to be the foundation for our world’s economy. As we enter a world of exponentially growing technologies like machine learning, the internet of things, mobility, big data, precision medicine and so many more areas; the possibilities of having a better way to do things is increasing too.

The challenge however is that many of these technologies like robotics and machine learning will replace many traditional jobs. Some predictions (which may not be far off the mark) even say these technologies will replace most existing jobs. Not only do we need a better way to do things, but we need to find a better way for society to work- to keep people in jobs.

It’s an amazingly exciting time to be an entrepreneur. For a long time, entrepreneurs used to be on the fringe of the economy- on the right side of the bell curve. They’re now right there in the middle, and it’s so exciting that entrepreneurs are now being seen as the absolute leaders of our economy, and our world.

Q: When did you realise entrepreneurship was the life for you?

[Kevin O’Leary] Whilst I was in High School, I had an interesting experience on my first job. I got hired as an ice cream scooper at a place called Magoo’s Ice Cream, in a shopping mall where girls from my class would hang out.

I remember on my very first day noticing that people ordered their ice-cream, and before they ate it – spat the gym they were chewing out on the floor. At the end of my first day, the woman I was working for said, ‘Okay you’ve got to take care of the scooping, then get down on the floor and scrape the gum out of the Mexican tiles’, I said ‘no! you hired me as a scooper, not a scraper. I’m not going to do that’. My concern was that a girl I was interested in was working in the shoe store across the road, and she’d see me on the floor scraping. This woman fired me on the first day of work…

I didn’t know what that meant to be fired, I had no idea. It was humiliating, and it was a great experience for me, because it taught me the difference between the two types of people in the world. Those that own the store, and those that scrape shit off the floor. You have to decide which one you want to me. I didn’t want to scrape shit off the floor. I wanted to own the store. And that was it. I owe her a great debt of gratitude, because it was so humiliating, I had to go back on my bike and tell my parents I’d been fired… they were concerned that I didn’t understand the working relationship between a boss and an employee. I knew that being an employee was a really bad idea, for me anyway. I’ve never worked for anybody since then.

[Stewart Butterfield] I grew up around two entrepreneurial parents, and so business was always around me. I played entrepreneurial games like Oregon Trail, had my own lemonade stand, and when we lived near a beach, I bought hot dogs from our local 7/11 and sold them on the beach for a profit!

That’s what entrepreneurship is all about–experimenting and finding a way of achieving some goal in the context of business. It’s something I’ve always found fascinating.

Q: What does success mean to you?

[Donna Karan] To me, success is balancing your personal life and your work life. It’s also being content and satisfied with what you accomplished so you can let it go and move forward. I’m not good at standing still, so success is about taking that next step and challenge, whatever it may be.

[Laurence Graff] I haven’t remained still since I started in business, I am always moving forward, always looking ahead. I have always said ‘the sky is the limit’ and have lived by that motto every day. I believe a great part of my success has been a result of ardent curiosity and an appetite to learn. At first I didn’t even know that I was hungry for knowledge, but as it came I wanted to know a little bit more. I began to travel extensively early on in my career, and with every trip I learned something new.

Q: How do your journey start with Slack?

[Stewart Butterfield] I would love to say that we knew all the answers in advance, but the truth is that we discovered our product and opportunity, rather than planning forit. We started a company to build a massively multiplayer game, and in the process it very quickly became apparent to us what the utility of Slack was as we used a prototype to collaborate internally.

When we first started I don’t think we realised the scale of the opportunity; in fact, we pitched investors that we hoped to achieve $100 million per year in revenues at our fullest potential. We blew past that last year.

We’re constantly coming to a better understanding of the scale of our opportunity, and after finding the product market fit was as good as it gets, we have been progressively re-evaluating our understanding and expectations for it.

Q: Can technology help us to become better leaders?

[Stewart Butterfield] If what you’re trying to do is get a large group of people to cooperate on a very complex problem, there’s a higher degree of alignment that’s required. However, if what you try to do is drive an assembly line to greater efficiency, it’s be very much command and control.

The complexity of modern enterprise scale businesses mean that one individual simply can’t keep the whole thing in their head; it’s too complex. There needs to be a lot more human-level finesse: getting people to that part of alignment and consciousness so that teams can accomplish complex tasks. .

Q: What are your views on startup culture?

[Gary Vaynerchuk] it’s fun to be an entrepreneur right now; you raise a lot of money, and you burn it- that’s why startups have time to go to 17 conferences and to host 44 networking dinners. These are things I still don’t do even though people tell me I’ve ‘made it.’

I’ll do these things once in a while, networking is powerful. It’s a piece of the equation, but a 1-4% piece of the equation not a 50% piece.

We have a lot of 23-27 year olds, raising a lot of money, and running around saying ‘I’m the CEO of this, it’s really cool!’ they’re not working on their product or business, they’re playing at being entrepreneurs.

[Dennis Crowley] If you’ve seen the HBO show Silicon Valley, you’ll see it’s a caricature of the tech scene in the valley. It’s funny because it’s true… but that’s not how it is for the broad majority of entrepreneurs. With Kingston Stockade FC (soccer club) for example, it’s entrepreneurship; but nothing like what you see on Silicon Valley.

I meet startups all the time, and while there’s a startup culture associated with people saying, ‘Hey! Let’s build this hip thing with apps’ that’s totally different that the reality which is people saying, ‘Hey! I have this idea for this product or technology that could make mobile phones more interesting… that could improve cities… or transportation… or health… or medicine.’ I meet with a lot of those folks too, and I feel they are far from what TV can stereotype as tech entrepreneurs.

[Kevin O’Leary] When I get pitched a typical Silicon Valley $5 million pre, looking for a $3 million raise, I just don’t even bother to entertain it, that’s all crap to me.

The entrepreneurs I like are the ones running real businesses without all the bullshit about the hype and the valuations. I’ve made the most money with people who put their nose to the grindstone and don’t talk about valuation. They talk about running business and growing it, and any way I can help I do.

I think a lot of investors now are tired of the BS around you know, ‘I’m part of very successful Silicon Valley, or Boston based team, I came out of Dallas, and my idea is worth $10 million so you’re lucky I’m even talking to you’. That’s all crap to me, total crap.

[Alfred Lin] Growing up, I was always interested in how businesses scale. How do they get customers? How do they make their products? How do they make money? My parents were bankers and they talked about how financing helps them grow their businesses. As a teenager, I had a paper route and a landscaping service for our block. I didn’t see much leverage in that. So I gathered the customers in the neighbourhood and sold off the contracts to classmates.

Tony Hsieh likes to tell the story that in college I went downstairs to his pizza business and bought pizza pies and then went upstairs and sold it by the slice to my roommates. It isn’t as predatory as it sounds. I simply wanted to get by money back, but quarters were a prized commodity for laundry, vending machines and arcade games, so I found that sometimes a quarter is worth more than a quarter.

[Stewart Butterfield] The notion of what constitutes a startup is more varied than people think. People use the phrase to apply to brand new businesses to the likes of Google and Facebook, two of the most valuable companies in the world.

If there’s one thing that thematically aligns all startups:a tolerance for innovation in how the companies are run. This means there’s alittle bit more risk taking and attacking problems in a way that hasn’t been done before.

There’s no point starting a company to do things exactly the way an established competitor does, because you simplycan’t be as successful. You have to do something different, and be much more willing to experiment with approaches to management and company structure.

Q: How important is financial literacy for entrepreneurs?

[Kevin O’Leary] Today’s entrepreneurs are simply not geared up with an understanding of finance, debt is and how to invest for the long term; that’s not really what entrepreneurship is about at the beginning.

What motivates great entrepreneurs is fear of failure; and here’s the thing – most entrepreneurs fail several times before they achieve success, and the more you fail, the more fear you have. There comes a point in every entrepreneur’s life where you realise that if you’re going to prove yourself, you’re going to have to do it in spite of the odds of success being very low. I think that’s what drives people. I never thought about investing or financial literacy or any of it until I woke up one day and I was a multi-millionaire… It just happened… and most entrepreneurs say the same thing. They don’t see it coming, they’re so impassioned driving their business and competing, one day they wake up and say ‘whoa, how did this happen? I’m rich!’

Q: What is the role of the founder in a business?

[Donna Karan] The founder is the innovator, the one who sets the wheels in motion. Once it’s up and running, the founder’s job is to empower and inspire others with the message, to nurture and make believers out of everyone who comes close, internally and externally. Later on, a founder needs to be open to evolution and growth. Dispensing of the ego and knowing when to let go. You give the birth, raise the child and then set them free and let them find their own way. That’s what I did last year with Donna Karan New York and DKNY. Now I’m raising my youngest child, Urban Zen, which is in an exciting stage of development and growth, both as a foundation and as a brand.

Q: How has your leadership style changed as your company has scaled?

[Stewart Butterfield] Scaling up is incredibly challenging; it’s definitely been the hardest part of my own entrepreneurship journey.

We found ourselves in the incredibly fortunate strategic position of having obvious product/market fit, and the opportunity to scale. We now have over 50,000 paid teams, and 2 million paid users, all over the world, across all different industries. The challenge for us has been managing the organisation so that we can best take advantage of the position that we’re in.

It’s the same for the leader as it is for all of the people working in the company. You might be familiar with The Peter Principle, which states that people are promoted to the level of their incompetence. It’s exactly the same in the real world: if you’re good at your job, it leads to advancement in your career, and then you don’t get to do those things anymore that made you deserve that advancement.

Hopefully I’m still competent to do my job,, but my talents that contributed to our success in the early days are employed much less frequently. A different set of skills is called upon.

I can turn to a lot of much more experienced people for advice, guidance and mentorship but our challenge is unique. . No one has ever done this before.

Q: Why should entrepreneurs be open?

[Sir Richard Branson] Virgin has launched many different businesses over the years, including record shops, radio stations, planes, trains and gyms. Fortunately, many of these endeavours have been successful.

Virgin Atlantic started as our first leased jumbo becoming the UK’s second largest airline. Others didn’t quite go to plan…Virgin Brides for instance was not a successful attempt at disrupting the Wedding industry! Nevertheless, it’s important to be open to ideas. When I was starting out with Virgin Atlantic, my mentor Freddie Laker gave me some incredibly useful advice. He told me: “You are going to have to get out there and sell yourself. Make a fool of yourself – whatever it takes. Make sure you appear on the front page and not the back pages.”

All entrepreneurs make mistakes, especially when starting out – it’s important to go through that learning process and to have fun along the way – whether you fail or succeed!

Q: What is the relationship of entrepreneurship to the corporate world?

[Jack Welch] Entrepreneurship within a corporation is quite different to the world of start-ups. I was an entrepreneur within the GE Corporation… I started the plastics business there, I was the first employee. Let me be clear, I wasn’t out there with my own credit card trying to survive, my wife wasn’t out in the garage working to keep our house going. I had a bank supporting me. Being a corporate entrepreneur is a less pressurised existence than being a start-up on your own.

In today’s world you can find funding at the drop of a hat, and so that key difference between the corporate setting and the ‘rest of the world’ is evaporating.

[Robin Li] Entrepreneurs have been absolutely essential in the transformation of the world we live in. By creating new businesses and new markets, they’re real change agents in history. This is something that’s been happening for many hundreds of years. As an entrepreneur you have a certain perspective and real motivation to see what’s in store for the future. And in trying to anticipate the future, entrepreneurs are chief agents in bringing the future about. It’s really been the role of the entrepreneur to take the measure of what people will want in the future, and to change the way people think and behave. They are and will continue to be a vital force in defining the world of the future.

That’s a lot of responsibility, and entrepreneurs need to demonstrate a consciousness of their importance and the potential they have to do both good and evil. They have to have a greater sense of social responsibility, especially in times of crisis, whether we’re talking about economic, environmental, or social crisis. Entrepreneurs should be focusing their efforts on creating a more equitable, just, and sustainable future.

[Sir James Dyson] Transport, natural disasters, the distribution of resources, globalisation – engineers and inventors have the traits and skillset to solve the problems the world faces today. And therefore have the potential to impact the world and economy. The economy can be boosted by exporting tangible technology that is in global demand. This is the hands of engineers.

We now sell Dyson machines in 73 countries around the world and that means we have a responsibility to be ambassadors for Great Britain. I have always believed that British industry can create world leading technology that benefits our exports, our economy and our wider society.

[Professor Muhammad Yunus] Entrepreneurs are innovators. One thing common in them that see opportunities. When they see an opportunity they grab it. These ‘opportunities’ are seen by various types of entrepreneurs in various ways. Personal profit-seeking entrepreneurs see it as an opportunity to make profit for themselves. Some among them could not care less what negative impact their business would produce on the society (alcohol producers, cigarette makers, and many other producers who produce obvious or cleverly hidden negative impacts). Some do care about negative impacts, and want to avoid such businesses or avoid negative impacts. Some want to make money while providing a product or service which is useful to the society, and the planet.

In a redesigned concept of profit-seeking businesses, the businesses would be transformed with a broader set of objectives, personal profit would be given the same priority as given to people’s sustainability and planet safety. Then entrepreneurs as a group can contribute in creating an economically, socially, and environmentally balanced and sustainable world.

For social business entrepreneurs, this is already the core of their business. They are totally dedicated to people and the planet. Their business has no place for the personal profit. In this business there is no room for conflict between selfishness and selflessness, because the business is entirely based on selflessness. Social business is the surest path to achieving all round sustainability at the fasted speed.

Social business entrepreneurs see the opportunity of solving problems of people which are now left to the governments to solve, or never considered to be solvable by anybody (unemployment, for example).

[N. R. Narayana Murthy] Entrepreneurs have multiple contributions to society.

Firstly, the power of an entrepreneur’s ideas add value to their society. Their ideas may reduce the cost of something, reduce the cycle time of tasks, improve productivity, improve quality of life, and bring new and easier ways of seeking pleasure through leisure products like books, music and videos.

Secondly, entrepreneurs create jobs. They use their ideas to create better and more highly paid jobs for their people. Therefore, they create prosperity for society.

When you enhance a society’s prosperity you don’t just create jobs in your own company, industry or sector. You also create job opportunities in the secondary and tertiary sectors. I do not know of any society that has become more prosperous without the power of entrepreneurship.

Thirdly, entrepreneurs serve as role models for society through their ability to dream, show courage, take risks, and transform the world around them.

[Wendy Kopp] We need entrepreneurship to pioneer new solutions that can change the trajectory of the world, and to tackle our most daunting social challenges, such as crippling poverty, extreme inequity, environmental destruction, and extremism. We need entrepreneurs to invent new ideas and will them into existence, and just as importantly, we need society to support these entrepreneurial ideas to succeed.

[Tony O. Elumelu] I believe that entrepreneurs, like other private sector operators, have an obligation to channel their acumen toward enhancing their social environments, as much as their financial statements. I run an Africapitalist organization, which means that my businesses create value for shareholders and society alike. For example, our Transcorp Power company is one of our nation’s top power generators—in 2013, we inherited a plant that generated less than 150 megawatts of electricity and now we contribute 750 megawatts to Nigeria’s grid, more than 15% of the country’s output. With increased power output, businesses, schools, hospitals and even private households are better able to save on running costs, freeing up capital for critical expenditures. We also run an agribusiness, Teragro, which is Nigeria’s first local producer of juice concentrate. Until Teragro began processing these concentrates, working directly with local farmers and giving them increased access to the wealth they help to create, Nigeria imported 100% of the concentrate used to manufacture juices that are consumed locally. Thus, our activities contribute to the companies’ bottom line, while creating jobs, improving quality of life and retaining more local value within the country.

It is inarguable that entrepreneurs play a key role in addressing social and global issues, particularly poverty. Personally, I am pleased to see that global leaders now agree that entrepreneurship, not charity, is better able to create progressive, sustainable development that benefits the poor. This is why the United Nations has included the promotion of development-oriented policies that support entrepreneurship in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In many developing countries where competing priorities and limited resources can overwhelm government systems, the private sector is uniquely positioned to mobilize the capital assets that can realize lasting, positive social transformation. The relationship between corporation and community is symbiotic: by contributing to raising the standards of living around them, these entrepreneurs are also positioning their businesses to profit from increased disposable incomes, a healthier, better-educated pool of potential employees, and numerous other benefits.

[Ricardo Salinas] A country without a healthy entrepreneurial culture can never be great. Entrepreneurs produce wealth, drive social change, generate jobs, and create and distribute goods and services that address all sorts of needs for people. In addition, an increasing number of entrepreneurs are taking their social responsibility very seriously. If governments were the key for development in the 19th century, entrepreneurs are the cornerstone of the 21st century economy. Private enterprise has shown to be much more effective, agile and efficient than government in an increasing array of human activities. Creating products and services that are needed by all levels of society is a way to decrease poverty. The most expensive good or service is the one that is unavailable, and this is especially true at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). On the other hand, if you keep attacking entrepreneurs and the wealth that they generate, you are doomed to failure.

[Vladimir Potanin] A businessperson who does not want to be considered a pariah in his own country, who does not want to be disliked, should behave in a way that is socially acceptable. He should help others, provide decent working conditions and decent pay, take care of the environment, care about the social issues. To enjoy respect, a businessperson should personally be involved in philanthropy, or engaged in projects that are important for the country and for society. The main idea here is that a business person should be working for society, not just paying society off.

[Laurence Graff] Giving back is something I feel is the duty of every entrepreneur. If you can improve a child’s life by giving them the provision for education that they may not have otherwise received, then it is something everyone should do. I founded the FACET foundation in 2008 to support young people in South Africa, close to the areas that we find our beautiful stones. We operate three charity initiatives with carefully selected partners and each has benefitted the communities that they operate in a great deal.

Q: How can entrepreneurs take their whole organization ‘with them’ on the journey?

[Sir Richard Branson] I stand by what I have said before – there is no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated yourself. People are fundamental in driving the success of a business. You should treat your employees like the smart and capable adults they are. Give them the choice to make informed decisions and you will cultivate an environment in which everyone can flourish.

Q: How do you stay motivated, innovative and stay creative?

[Sir Richard Branson] I love to challenge myself so creativity comes with that. I also think it’s important to keep your body active as well as your mind, so I believe challenges in the physical sense are just as important.

The Big Change team have worked incredibly hard on our third STRIVE challenge this year. It has been a gruelling but wonderful experience doing this alongside my children, Holly and Sam and an amazing group of people all dedicated to this worthy cause. This experience was not shy of some falls along the way, as my accident during training showed! But my attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again!

[Laurence Graff[Diamonds are a miracle of nature, they are millions of years old, they survived a hazardous journey to the earth’s surface and the discovery of them is an exciting moment. To see the rough diamond and then watch it come to life on the polisher’s wheel with incredible fire and scintillation is incredibly inspiring. I stare into the depths of a diamond and I am lost for a moment in its beauty. I am constantly in awe and inspired by this and feel honoured to work with these magnificent stones each day.

[Frederik Paulsen] I wanted to prove to my parents that I could take this company they had started, and develop it into something incredible; that was my real driver.

Just before my father passed away, the company had grown considerably. He said to me, ‘I have six children, and who would have believed that you, Frederik, out of all my children would have been the one that succeeded!’ I’m not sure that was a compliment!

[Kanya King] What inspires me? Getting results, being creative, making an impact and making a difference. I am still passionate about all the potential for MOBO to achieve in so many areas; the new ideas that are sparked by a simple conversation and all the things we could do to support greater inclusion not only in Music but across many other areas.

Every day brings another opportunity, so our main challenge is ensuring we focus so that we can achieve the best results. I have always believed that juggling multiple tasks or ventures will spread you thin and limit both your effectiveness and productivity.

In business, there tend to be one or two activities that are the primary determinants for success. The key is to prioritise and fully focus on these few activities.

[Dennis Crowley] Different things energise different people. I get energised from building things that people like – such as when we launch a new feature in Swarm or the Foursquare City Guide app. That makes me feel great and makes me want to keep building. When we built a soccer team and a thousand people showed up to watch them play? That also makes me feel great and energizes me to make that product and experience better for fans.

I’ve met people who are totally motivated by being in the press, or motivated by money, and so many things… but for me, it’s about making sure people enjoy the things we’re building. That’s what keeps me motivated.

Q: Are entrepreneurs born or made?

[N. R. Narayana Murthy] Entrepreneurship is not something you are born with, it’s about dreaming, daring, sacrifice and passion. These are attributes that one can pick up, if one is in the right environment, and with the right opportunities and encouragement.

The truth is that anybody can be an entrepreneur.

Q: What is your view on risk as an entrepreneur?

[Thor Björgólfsson] Are you the guy who wants to know what he gets at the end of the month? Or are you the guy who says I’ll take my chances and will do very well or very badly. If you can make that distinction in your own mind, the rest is up to you. That’s where entrepreneurship comes from; it means you can live with risk.

Risk appetite is crucial for entrepreneurs.

Take a look at todays’ venture capital world, people try and build in some element of risk by tying founder’s own outcomes to the performance of the company, but the bottom line is the entrepreneur needs to understand what their own perspective is.

If you can’t handle the risk and you’re stressed out all the time, all you’ll do is focus on getting to the finishing line. If you can handle the risk, you are free of worry and can immerse yourself… diving headfirst into your venture. That’s where the winners come out.

Q: How can being self-aware help entrepreneurs?

[Gary Vaynerchuk] I’ve always been pretty self-aware, and that really helped me succeed in my early days.

Being self-aware means talking to yourself quite a bit, and being honest with yourself.

As I put myself ‘out there.’ I’ve had to be more sensitive and more self-aware because of the negatives that come with it- vanity, ego, and all those things.

Because I’m self-aware of how people may perceive me, and because I try and be in tune with some of those vain, simplistic, and raw needs… I’m pushing even harder on my ‘noble’ characteristics to balance the vanity, selfishness and lowest common denominator characteristics.

For me acknowledging the fact that I love when people take a selfie with me, I realise I have a sense of responsibility to give even more back to my community to have that luxury.

Q: What are the key drivers for an entrepreneur?

[Robin Li] I don’t think that those who set out to create companies with nothing in mind other than making money are apt to succeed. That’s not going to get you out of bed, eager to get to work. It has to come from a higher place. In my case, I knew that I had the ability, through these technologies that I understood well and could confidently implement, to make a real difference in the access ordinary people had to information. And I knew that connecting people to information in the easiest, most convenient way would make a tremendous difference in the world. It wasn’t an abstract desire to create. And money is just an afterthought. What drove me to it was this desire to make a difference in an area that badly needed it, and my recognition that I was the right person to step on and take on that challenge.

[Sir James Dyson] Frustration – from vacuum cleaners that don’t work properly, to bulky, inefficient motors, I am forever being frustrated by products that don’t do the job and so I develop technology that works better. At Dyson we have spent over £40 million to create the Dyson Digital Motor because we knew we could do better than what was currently on offer. This is what excites me, seeing an idea develop from a sketch to a fully functioning machine. This attitude is at the heart of Dyson’s 2,000 engineers and scientists. It drives the company forward.

[Professor Muhammad Yunus] I use the word ‘entrepreneurship’ in the context of personal-profit driven business only. For social business I’ll use ‘social business entrepreneurship’. Both are entrepreneurship, but of different kinds, leading to different results. For clarity I am using two qualifying words for one.

The difference between the two types entrepreneurship is very significant. One is selfish entrepreneurship, another is selfless entrepreneurship. It is the selfless entrepreneurship which will lead world to social, economic, and environmental sustainability, and create a new civilization of balance between present residents of the world and all future generations.

[Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw] There are different types of entrepreneurs. There are entrepreneurs who will do it at any cost, they are so passionate about their ideas and bringing things to market, that they’re willing to stick it out at all odds. I consider myself in that class, I went through a huge number of challenges, and stuck it out.

Today’s entrepreneurs, I feel, are less risk-takers. The main approach they take is to secure funding, without giving-up the comfort… through smart funding. I was willing to make sacrifices, I was willing to rough it out and struggle. In those days the concept of venture funding didn’t exist! I had to rough it out to get to success… but today, young entrepreneurs are driven by the excitement of creating a company of their own. It’s driven by an opportunistic fad.

In Bangalore, which is becoming the start-up capital of the world, you are seeing a huge number of tech start-ups. I know that only a few of them will be really successful, and many will fall by the wayside, but these guys are not taking huge risks because they know that if their businesses fail, they can just take up employment. They’re just saying, “hey, this is so cool… let’s give up our jobs and try it out!”. These companies get funded by VCs, who are driven by ideas, and so the entrepreneurs are not leaving their comfort zones.

Entrepreneurs who leave their comfort zones are the ones who will make it big, those are the entrepreneurs who really believe in their idea.

[N. R. Narayana Murthy] At the highest level, entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to make a difference to society. After this, there is the desire- shared by all entrepreneurs- to create wealth for themselves, their colleagues and family.

Ultimately, entrepreneurship boils down to the desire to become more relevant to society. It is the desire to make the environment better for people; that is how you get recognised, respected, and how- ultimately- you have the opportunity to make money.

The drive of entrepreneurship is about earning the respect of society by becoming relevant to that society.

[Tim Draper] I believe it is the mission that drives the best entrepreneurs. In my experience, entrepreneurs driven by money will give up when the money dries up, and the entrepreneurs who are driven by leading people usually run out of money because they overhire.

[Wendy Kopp] In my case, it’s an obsession with how different the world would be if many more of society’s most capable, committed, promising future leaders channelled their energy towards ensuring that the world’s most marginalized children have the chance to fulfil their potential. This idea has proven much more challenging than I initially dreamed it could be, but at the same time my conviction in its importance has grown a lot stronger as I’ve learned more about the extent and nature of the problem of educational inequity and how we can solve it.

[Steve Case] The drive to make a difference is important for entrepreneurs, there is a certain passion that comes around an idea that you- or a team- has which says, “hey! This is a better product, or a better service, or a better way of doing things… we want to make it available to everybody!”

The act of taking an idea and making it available to everybody, with scale and impact is a huge motivator for entrepreneurs.

[Jerry Yang] What drive entrepreneurs vary; but most good entrepreneurs feel and see a need for change (and a need to innovate/disrupt) out of necessity. Often the way to do something “better” is so compelling to them, even if the rest of the world may not see it yet. Many entrepreneurs are also perfectionists – they strive for excellence and have a higher standard of achievement than the rest of the world.

[Tony O. Elumelu] Ask any entrepreneur and most, if not all, will tell you that they are driven by passion. This passion could be for a single, innovative idea, or it could be a passion to do something that changes the world. But without passion, it would be impossible to stay the course of this most challenging of vocations, and rewards at the end of the journey make all the struggle worthwhile.

[Dave McClure] Every entrepreneur is motivated by different things… It could be a passion to get a business off the ground, it could be solving a problem- it could be a one-person company where someone is running their own business, a food-truck for example- or it could be someone changing the world with a new technology, or a new way of doing things.

Small business and entrepreneurship is a driver for job creation and economic benefit. Tech entrepreneurship also gives people the ability to scale a lot faster, and larger than traditional businesses have in the past- and that’s very exciting.

[David Cohen] I’ve worked with a lot of great companies, and many that didn’t turn-out so well. One thing I can tell you is that what drives entrepreneurs, what they look like and what makes them tick is all over the map.

When you talk about the general patterns of some of the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve been around, the common thread is that they have a vision of the future of the world. They see the world a certain way, and they want it to be that way.

I was an early investor in the first-round of Uber, and when I first met Ryan Graves (employee #1 at Uber), he had a very clear vision of what was wrong with transportation and how they wanted to change the way people wanted to move around cities. You got this feeling that he wasn’t going to stop until the world worked like that!

As I think about other great entrepreneurs I’ve been around, they have a clear shared-vision that they can communicate, that they are very motivated to make happen.

[Ricardo Salinas] There is something special in every true entrepreneur, and it is not the pursuit of money for its own sake. There is an internal fire that burns inside and drives them to lead a more difficult and uncertain life than the rest. There is also the assurance that you have a new process to resolve an existing problem or a new product that can change lives. An entrepreneur is by definition a nonconformist, always in need to change things. When you tap into this vein with the right energy and team, it will more often than not lead to financial gain.

[Vladimir Potanin] To an entrepreneur it is important to see the results of your efforts – not just in the bottom line, but in how a company has been transformed. This is an important psychological factor.

[Dr. Michael Otto] In Europe, entrepreneurs are less driven by getting rich. The emphasis is on the desire to put an idea into practice. Successful company founders quickly come to terms with setbacks and failures, and see these more as incentives to keep going.

In my own case, as I joined a company that had already been established, I was particularly driven to further expand the company from a nationally important mail order company to an international company group. Besides diversification and internationalisation, most importantly we took the first steps towards the digital transformation back in the 1990s.

[Naveen Jain] If I care enough about something, as opposed to writing a cheque and letting someone else do it, or bitching about the problem, I say… ‘you know what? If I care enough about something? I’m going to go out and do it…’ that means I’m giving one of the most valuable things I have… my time. In life, you can always make more money and get more of everything- but one thing you can never get back is the time you give.

As humans, we are giving. Compassion and empathy are hard-wired into who we are – but for many people, they think that writing a cheque and calling it philanthropy satisfies that part of us. To me, philanthropy is not about giving money, it’s about solving problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the impact you can have.

You may become rich, engage in philanthropy and help a million people but the only way you can help a billion people is by building a profitable business. Making money has almost become a taboo! People say, “oh my god! You’re making money?” and I say, “you know what? I’m so proud that my business makes money… it’s the only way I can scale and make a huge impact…”

People get so cagey; they may want to provide fresh water to billions of people but choose to make it non-profit because of the taboo of making money doing it. You know what? If you can’t make a profit, you can’t help a billion people – so go make a profit!

If you care about providing fresh water, affordably, to billions of people, and let’s assume that you are able to do that, and in the process you made a billion dollar profit… are people going to come to you and say, “how dare you help a billion people?!” no…. they’re probably going to say, “you know what, we’re really proud of you and we wish you could have made an even bigger profit!” why? You solved a problem.

[Will.I.Am] I’ve never said, ‘yeah man, we’re gonna’ be rich!’ – money has never been the ‘carrot’ for me. How do you keep driving forward and doing things? That’s what motivates me… I’m like, ‘man, what’s next? What can we do next?’

I live in four little boxes… Music, Philanthropy, Entrepreneurship and Television.

Music… What always frustrated the hell out of the Black Eyed Peas about me was that we would be at the Super bowl, or would have just finished a 3-night stadium tour, playing 80,000 seats or 120,000 people, and I would say, ‘right guys, what’s next?’ and everybody would be like, ‘ahh, c’mon man, why not just relax?’ but I’d be like, ‘c’mon, we could do this, we could do that!’ My mind just never stopped thinking about what we could be doing next.

Philanthropy… We have college track, a robotics programme, a computer science programme, and I keep thinking about what next? What else can we put in to take this forward? I’m always searching for what we can do next to build.

Entrepreneurship… I’m always in meetings going, ‘hey, we can do this! or we can do that!’ or ‘we need to get to meet this person,’ or ‘let’s go hunt down that person, or that company.’ There is a tenacity, an energy to how I approach it. I want to hurry-up and complete ‘this’ so we can move onto the next thing we should be working on! Even when we get to market, I’m always thinking of how we can get to market in a big way, what partners do we need? What partners are we missing? Or do we even need partners? I’m like, ‘let’s go to Israel and find AI people, let’s go to the Philippines and find developers.’

Television… I didn’t even think I wanted to do TV. I got a call from the BBC who were like, ‘you’d be great on television…’ I did TV for 4 years through the BBC and then decided I wanted to develop my own shows. I pitched a show to a couple of networks and didn’t get any traction, that happens… your first time at something you’ll get slammed… that hurt. I’m a big fan of Apple, I love Apple. In the world of music, Apple would be Michael Jackson. I did music, never thought I would work with Michael Jackson; but he’s my hero, my inspiration, and the same applies to Apple. I found out about Apple TV, and decided to pitch them an idea instead of going to traditional networks. The first piece of content they’re commissioning on Apple TV is my show ‘Planet of the Apps.’

You have to keep reaching, keep thinking about what the next-level is.

If we climbed Mount Everest together…. And we were all at the top, tired, with blisters, dehydrated… I’m the guy who’s like, ‘Yo! Let’s build a freakin’ rocket launcher here so we can go to the Moon! We’re close enough!’

[Donna Karan] I’m driven to do what I haven’t done. I love a creative challenge, to learn a new craft, a new business, a new way of doing things. The inspiration is always there. Right now, I’m looking out the window at a tree that has white leaves and wondering what I can do with it. Creatively, nature always inspires me. But on a practical level, it’s about filling the void, coming up with something that answers the frustration of what’s missing, what would make life easier. For example, I’m obsessed with creating an urban hotel and wellness center. I want all my medical and spa needs in one place so I don’t have to run around the city. That’s the kind of thing I want to address while still dressing people. I want to help my customer inside and out.

Q: What are the characteristics of a great entrepreneur?

[Professor Muhammad Yunus] A great entrepreneur is some one who makes this world better, sustainable, addresses problems of people and planet, inspires other people to follow his path. He is remembered for what he has done for the world, not what he has done for himself. Success of an enterprise should not be measured by the stock market success. It is a narrowly defined indicator. If we continue to take this indicator as the measure of success, economic and other sustainability we’ll go out of the window; we’ll be put on the path of ultimate disaster. To avoid that we’ll have to redefine business and the concept of business success. Under the redefined concept, our business success will be a measure of bringing balance in the three P’s , Profit, People, and Planet. While we’ll consider the benefits to the people, we’ll have to make sure not only we consider the people today, but also consider the interest of the people who will be here in this planet over many future millenniums. Our successors should be grateful to us remembering that we left them a good and safe planet and healthy structure of a balanced society.

[N. R. Narayana Murthy] Great entrepreneurs are people with tremendous passion. Without passion you cannot go on a journey that requires such huge personal sacrifices, looks bleak, risky and impossible in the beginning. Great entrepreneurs are people who act according to the adage, “A plausible impossibility is better than a convincing possibility!“ They could easily take-up a 9 – 5 job anytime with good pay and lead a comfortable life. But, instead, they say “This looks impossible, but it is plausible and I want to lead this task!” Such a dynamic mind-set only comes out of passion, optimism, hope and courage.

Great entrepreneurs are essentially leaders. Why? Because, leadership is about raising the aspirations of people, and empowering them to convert what seems impossible to the realm of possibility; making it a better world for everyone. Robert Kennedy, paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, once said “Most people see things as they are and wonder why, I dream of things that never were and say why not…” That is the essence of entrepreneurship and leadership.

Entrepreneurs are very open-minded. They have to be! Unless you are open to new ideas and open to face the risks from these ideas, you cannot transform the world.

[Tim Draper] A great entrepreneur has his or her mission written all over him or her. When asked about anything, the only answer is something that leads to the business. It bursts out of the entrepreneur’s chest when asked about what he or she does.

A great business is something else. A great business has an enormous market, and a focused approach to build a wedge into that enormous market. A great business connects with the end user, and has margins that increase over time because the product is mission critical to the user.

[Jamal Edwards] Great entrepreneurs never give up.

When I see Complex Media just raised 21 million dollars, it gives me hope and shows that the scene is attractive and active. If I’m consistent and keep coming up with new ideas, there’s no reason why SBTV can’t be reaching out to those levels.

Great entrepreneurs also surround themselves with a great team. You need to have people around you that have the same vision as you. You can have a big team, but everyone has to be on the same level, with the same vision.

When I’m fortunate to come across people like Sir Richard Branson, it inspires me to be around them and learn from them, to see their vibe, and connect to what they’re doing.

We always say SBTV means ‘Steadily Building the Vision.’

[Wendy Kopp] I have the great fortune to to work with social entrepreneurs who are pursuing this idea in countries all around the world. In my work with these outstanding entrepreneurs, I’ve seen first-hand that individuals of all different personality types, profiles, experiences can be successful. What they all have in common is underlying passion, extraordinary perseverance, the ability to find creative solutions in the face of obstacles, and a real commitment to continuous learning and improvement.

[Steve Case] Passion matters… It’s rarely a straight-line to success, usually it’s a roller-coaster.

Entrepreneurship is a team-sport! The entrepreneur is important, but the team around the entrepreneur are critical- they are the ones who will take that idea, and execute against it.

Perseverance is critical too. Whether it’s the internet or other things, evolutions happen in evolutionary ways, and so taking that long-term view is important.

Passion, People and Perseverance… the Three P’s, are the characteristics of great entrepreneurs.

[Jerry Yang] Most successful entrepreneurs share the traits of perseverance, confidence, and tremendous self-awareness. All great entrepreneurs can see the next big things clearly, and can be quite contrarian. On the whole entrepreneurs are extremely focused on the details. Most importantly, a successful entrepreneur knows his/her own weaknesses, and surrounds themselves with people that make them better.

[Tony O. Elumelu] Great men, regardless of their chosen profession, have shared characteristics: discipline, zeal, competitiveness. They are driven to succeed, and often this requires a brazenness or boldness that most will identify as risk-taking behaviour, but is often calculated. Great entrepreneurs do things differently. They exhibit traits that set them apart from the general population and, though not all were born leaders, I believe their achievements make them leaders among their peers.

[Ricardo Salinas] An entrepreneur is willing to weigh and take risks and assume a long term outlook. He or she is furiously independent, displays a high level of energy, and is always looking for ways to improve other people’s lives—the result of these driving characteristics is what creates wealth for society.

[Vladimir Potanin] In the top ranks of any kind of human activity, only those who have a strong will and who are goal-oriented will survive and take leadership positions.

Keeping your word and fully delivering on your obligations are held in very high regard in the business world. The ability to take on responsibility not just for yourself, but for others; to be accountable for the consequences of your decisions and actions.

A person who chooses business as his profession takes on certain risks, so psychologically one needs to be very resilient in the face of challenges. Statistically, fewer than ten percent of people have the psychological make-up to behave this way. Many prefer to have less in life but with greater certainty. Another important point: a business person is just like a surgeon, who cannot work without inflicting pain. Not everyone is capable of it, and few are inclined to do it.

Finally, a business person should have a certain gift for doing business. There are no good musicians who do not have a good ear, no artists without a great imagination, no writers without an excellent command of the language. The same goes for our trade. It is not enough to know how to use a calculator or build sound financial models. You need to have vision. You should look at a business process as if it were a living thing; you need to sense its music. You know, a good chess player does not need to spend a great deal of time calculating – sometimes one look at the chessboard is enough to know if a combination is good or bad. The emotional and creative fire probably isn’t as strong in business, but it is definitely present.

[Will.I.Am] Great entrepreneurs have networks, they have the ability to bring the people together that will help them see their idea through and make it real.

There’s some people that are really gifted at their craft, for example the best guitarist in the world, or the best pianist in the world, or the best singer in the world, or the best graphic designer, the fastest runner…. Just because you’re the best at those things doesn’t mean you know how to bring people together so that everyone else sees that.

Usain Bolt is not just fast. He’s also a great networker. If he wasn’t? he would have stayed where he lived, and would have just been a fast-guy from where he lived! There was something that took him out of his little-square and got him to network, to bring people around him so he could create bigger circles. It’s the same with singing or engineering.

Then there’s people who network like really, really, really, really amazingly. My mentor is Jimmy Iovine; he started off as a producer, became an executive, and was one of the founders of Interscope– which he sold twice- and then he co-founded Beats. Now he works at Apple.

A networker is like a chameleon; you think they’re one thing but they can take any shape- any form.

[Laurence Graff] A great entrepreneur always acts with full intention and without limitation, always striving for the best in everything they do. From an early age I knew I had to rely on myself, look after myself, to not be afraid of anything. It gave me huge confidence and unshakable belief. It is that belief that overcomes obstacles and paves the way to success.

[John Caudwell] The best founders and leaders have extremely sharp commercial senses and abilities, and an absolute drive to produce value, minimise cost and maximise profits. This has to be done however with absolute integrity, morality, honesty and truthfulness.

Without truthfulness I would never have been able to grow anything of any significance, I would have been ‘found out.’ Having truthfulness and ethics within a business creates trust among employees at all levels and is critical. Being realistic, you will always recruit people who turn out to be dishonest- it doesn’t matter how hard you try to avoid it- and you need to remove them very quickly, and also encourage a culture of honesty.

Just as a very small example… none of my employees were ever allowed to take a present at Christmas from any suppliers or customers, nor were they allowed to give any. If people were given presents, we’d gather them altogether and auction them off for our charity! Instead of creating favour as a result of gifts, we created something good.

I had to lead this from the top. I led the company with an approach of complete honesty. That didn’t mean I told people everything; in a lot of cases, I kept a lot of information to myself and managed things on a need-to-know basis, but when I did tell people things, it was always based on the truth. If I couldn’t tell them the truth, I told them I couldn’t tell them and they had to trust me….

So many people make false claims. They promise jam tomorrow, and while a very small number deliver huge rewards, the vast majority fail.

[Alfred Lin] Great founders such as Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Drew Houston of Dropbox, or Adi Tatarko of Houzz, are all on a mission to build a product or service that corrects something that they believe the world got wrong. They are on a mission to correct a personal problem or personal pain. They are incredibly hard working, brutally intellectually honest, and insanely curious. They are outsiders to the industry they disrupt.

Our partner Michael Moritz also wrote the following to describe great entrepreneurs: The creative spirits. The underdogs. The resolute. The determined. The outsiders. The defiant. The independent thinkers. The fighters and the true believers. These are the founders with whom we partner. They’re extremely rare. And we’re ecstatic when we find them.

Q: What are the characteristics of great investors?

[Alfred Lin] At Sequoia, we don’t think about what makes a great investor. From idea to IPO and beyond, we want to be great business partners to the founders we back. We don’t think about buying low or selling high. We measure our success by helping our founders build enduring franchises and category kings and by being the first call by our founders when they need bespoke and prescient advice.

On our website, our ethos mentions: Our team mirrors the founders with whom we partner: hungry overachievers with a deep-rooted need to win. Many come from humble backgrounds. Many are immigrants. Many formed or built companies of their own before joining Sequoia. Each shares the mindset of an entrepreneur, and knows what it means to walk that path.

Q: What characterises a great leader?

[Dr. Michael Otto] From my own experience I can say that thoroughly entrepreneurial characters generally have a visionary element to them. By this, I don’t necessarily mean that they were the first to have a business idea, but the way in which they brought their idea to fruition makes them successful pioneers. Additionally I believe that a great leader is also characterised by his commitment to society and environment.

[Jack Welch] I believe that establishing a culture of truth and trust is absolutely critical, and that takes effort and energy every day. You have to ceaselessly reach for truth and trust every day, and you have to be relentless in your pursuit of trust, and show your people that you have their back. That doesn’t mean you are weak, it means you have their back.

Great leaders understand that there are three key measurements to success in a business.

Employee engagement

Customer satisfaction

Cash flow

Employee engagement means you have to get under the skin of every employee, becoming a chief meaning officer, giving your team purpose, getting everyone on the same page. You have to make sure your entire team knows where they’re going, how they’re going to get there, and what’s in it for them. This last question, what’s in it for them? is often left off.

As for customer satisfaction, everyone must understand in their bones that only satisfied customers create growth and long-term business success.

If you get the first two right, the third, cash flow, will come naturally. If you take these three key simple measurements, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and cash flow, and orient your strategy around that, you’ll have a winning leadership approach.

As a great leader, you can’t just have initiatives every other day. If you say something is important, you have to mean it. You have to put time, investment, rewards, and resources behind it.

In our school (JWMI) we currently have 1,200 students online with an average age of 38, all of whom work within companies. Our business is to give them the tools to grow vertically in their companies. Many traditional MBA programmes are in essence, a graceful way to change jobs. Our mission is to teach students how to be great leaders.

[Steve Ballmer] The most important thing a leader has to have is an idea on where they want to go and the ability to bring people with them. Most discussion about leadership is about styles and characteristics, but the most important thing is having a clear sense — and a right sense — of where you want to go. Dangerous leaders can be charismatic and effective at mobilizing people, but take them down a wrong path.

So the questions for strong leaders who are trying to do the right thing are: Do you know where you want to go? Are you right?

Number two, you need to have the tools that allow you to build followership. You need to clearly communicate the why, to explain and to show people how they participate, what their role is in making whatever it is you’re trying to do happen.

Q: How do great leaders act as motivators and keystones in their organisations?

[Steve Ballmer] There are many different leadership styles, and something different works for every leader. Preaching about one style or another is probably not all that effective. In smaller organizations you approach motivating people differently than in large ones, and it’s a different thing to be a direct leader of individual employees than to be a leaders of leaders. When Microsoft was small, you could walk into every office…when you have 100,000 people, that’s obviously really different. The techniques of my successor are different than mine, and part of that’s the time, but part is just different muscles and different ways to be – there’s not a right or wrong.

Q: What are the differences in leading a high growth young business versus a public company?

[Steve Balmer] In a smaller company you are working hard just to get to critical mass – getting there is hard. You don’t have a feedback loop that’s already telling you what’s going well and what’s not. Over the time I was at Microsoft, it went from basically a start up, getting an idea and a plan coherent enough to get lift off, and then once you have lift off revving the engine and revving up the hamster wheel.

In a bigger company you get good at spinning the wheel, but when you decide to do something new, that takes one of two forms. The first is a linear extension of what you’ve done before, the other looks more like something new for which you need to be build new capabilities you don’t yet have. In that second case, you need to do what I call getting in the weight room, build new muscles so you may be ready to pounce, see opportunities that are not yet in front of you, build skills in new areas.

Small companies will get an idea and try to scale up. Big companies have to decide when to extend, when to extend and scale, and when to do something new. They need to build capabilities in terms of insight and execution to do the new thing.

Q: What enables a startup to become a scale-up?

[Dennis Crowley] It’s a mix of product-market-fit, size of the opportunity, and whether there’s a great behind it. That said, some ideas are just really good ideas. Airbnb is a good idea, Uber is good idea, Snapchat just takes off… people love it.

With Foursquare, our original app was a good idea but it wasn’t a hundred million users good idea. The data behind the app, and what we do with the data? That’s our good idea. That’s our hundred million dollars in revenue idea. When people think of Foursquare, they think of our two apps (Foursquare City Guide and Foursquare Swarm) – but the apps are only a small part of the reason we’re performing really well as a company. The bigger story is what we can do with the data the apps generate, and the technology we’ve built to enable that. That is the reason we’ve been able to scale.

I made a check-in service called Dodgeball before Foursquare, it was moderately successful and we sold it to Google. When we started Foursquare, we knew we needed more people to use it- so we put game dynamics into it. That was a calculated decision to make it more approachable and accessible and interesting, and that’s what made it mainstream. We knew early on, however, that the big play was in the data and what you could do with the data.

[John Sculley] To scale? you have the stars aligned- timing is everything.

When we created the first personal digital assistant, the Newton, I wasn’t a trained electrical engineer or computer scientist and I didn’t realise at the time that while we were clearly pointing in the right direction towards mobility, handheld devices, and the amazing things you could do without a keyboard; they reality as we were probably 15 years too early. Even some of the best computer scientists in the world didn’t realise that at the time, we needed Moore’s Law to continue doubling processing power every couple of years for at least a decade before it was practical to build products like iPhones.

It’s important that you separate the entrepreneurial leadership that defines new industries from the entrepreneurial leadership that’s opportunistic and takes advantage of the derivative effects of new industries.

I’d only been at Apple a few months and I was sitting in the Macintosh lab with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates listening to them talking about their ‘noble cause.’

I had just left one of the most competitive markets in the world- the Cola Wars. In a decade, Pepsi had gone from being outsold 10:1 in 50% of the USA to passing Coca Cola, becoming the largest selling consumer packaged good in the United States. I had never heard about having a ‘noble cause’ in business- for me, it was about gladiatorial competition…. Someone wins, someone loses…

Here was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates- two young guys, under the age of 30, talking about their noble cause of empowering knowledge workers with tools for the mind, making them incredibly productive, and helping them to change the way things were done in our world; creating entirely new industries in the process.

I’d never heard that before… I’d never people talking in terms of creating new industries… in my world it was always about winning market share in existing industries.

There are very few people who genuinely have the leadership capacity to build businesses like this. In this decade it would be people like Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg– people who are changing the future by creating new industries.

Every major new success has those types of brilliant entrepreneurs leading, and has significant derivative effects, and I’m particularly interested in how you take the derivative effects of brilliant, world-changing innovations, and turn them into global businesses.

In 2007, just 10 years ago, Eastman Kodak made the decision to double-down on their silver halide film processing business. They were in a brutal, competitive battle with Wal-Mart who had entered the single-use film camera market, and were outselling Kodak in their particular channel. Kodak decided to become more aggressive with their pricing, and doubled-down on silver halide film. Here’s the thing… Kodak was the company that invented digital photography… Kodak was the largest printer of photographic images in the world… they knew technology was going to eventually build an industry for digital photography… but they saw photography as being about memories, and about building albums of things you wanted to save. Kodak had been living in linear-time, something which is intuitive to most of us, where we think in days, weeks, months, years…

The world had already started to shift when people like Steve Jobs started to take-advantage of the fact that you could connect the dots, and take a mobile device running on a 3G network, and use that to send photographs. That eventually led to the IPhone and 4 years later, Kodak – which had been a $26 billion market-cap company, filed for bankruptcy.

When Evan Spiegel created Snapchat, he saw photography in an entirely different way from Kodak; he was from a different generation. Evan saw that smartphones could take photos to use for communications, not for archiving into an album. He turned Snapchat into something young people loved! They could do very risqué things with photos that would disappear… they could add effects and emoji’s to communicate how they were feeling… This was a better alternative to phone calls and texts and it created a whole new derivative industry that came out of iPhone and Android. This derivative industry has led to its own multi-billion dollar companies.

The ability to understand derivative effects of major new industries that are being created by these exceptionally brilliant handful of leaders is very important for entrepreneurs.

These derivative effect opportunities for entrepreneurs are going to increase because of the exponential growth of these 5 or 6 major technologies which are compounding in growth at an accelerated rate.

Q: What are the challenges of building a high-growth business?

[John Caudwell] The challenges of a high-growth business are utterly endless.

To grow, a business needs to be filled with the very best people- but for young businesses in their infancy or startup phase, attracting these people can be extremely hard. The people you attract to your business are part of its evolution; as you become more successful, you are able to get better people, which in turn makes you more successful, and so on.

For some businesses, those that have a very unique selling proposition, like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, the commercial aspect of running the business is made a lot easier by having a desirable proposition right from the start.

If you don’t have a desirable product, and you’re a ‘me too’ player like we were, your differentiator comes down to the skill of your people to operate with honesty, integrity, with high levels of service, while achieving the best value possible. To achieve the very best price, while remaining profitable and giving people great value does, in itself, present challenges. You have to negotiate the best deals you can with manufacturers… you have to have very slick internal operations to keep your cost of sales and operation down… but you have to still pay your people really motivational salaries and bonuses! This last piece is important. You cannot run a business without great people, who are incentivised to be great; and so, you must protect them, and pay them appropriately.

There were times when we were recruiting thousands of people in a year, and the stress and pressure that places on everything and everyone is immense. Growth puts your management systems, operational systems and accommodation under pressure. How do you start a business with one or two people like I did and grow to a hundred? One of the many challenges, for example, is accommodation. Where is it going to come from? And then when you go from a hundred to a thousand, where do you put all those people!? Then there are all the other challenges like management systems, HR, IT systems, culture, cash flow and so many more. These are all huge dilemmas for growing businesses. Just keeping the infrastructure of your business scaling and running efficiently is a formidable challenge.

I scaled the business from just me, to 10,000 people some 20 years later. Scaling and keeping control of that business was practically impossible- I failed many times, but managed to succeed overall through sheer determination, hard-work and having very, very good people.

As my business was growing, I looked at the failures more than the successes (which are easy to take for granted). As a business owner, I was probably criticised for being somewhat failure-focussed. I used to say to all my people that yes- we can celebrate our successes, and we have to succeed, but the failures are what will sink the business or hold it back. You have to take a balanced view, appreciate that you’re doing well and growing, but also appreciate that there will be failures and problems in the business, and until those are put right- you cannot celebrate too much!

[John Sculley] When you look at companies that survive growth, you are seeing the importance of people- not just ideas.

One of the big surprises to young people when they show up in Silicon Valley and say, ‘hey, I was top of my class and have all these great wonderful ideas…’ is that there are literally thousands of people just like that across Silicon Valley who were top of their class and have incredible ideas.

Successful companies that scale stand out because of their people! You have to have incredibly talented people leading the company, and within it.

Noble cause businesses like Apple, Facebook and Tesla are doing more than just making money. They are inspiring everyone who is involved with them- from customers to employees and partners- to say, ‘this is so important that everything else is secondary…’

That’s why you see these charismatic leaders as being so crucial to the success of these scaling companies.

Let’s take Facebook as an example… 4 years ago, a lot of people were writing Facebook off saying, ‘well… it was a cool idea to have social networks on your big-screens, but now everything is moving mobile, and Facebook doesn’t have a position in mobile…’ – Guess what… 4 years later, Facebook gets almost 80% of its profits from mobile products and services. Some of this came through the acquisition of businesses like WhatsApp and Instagram, but a lot came through organic growth. Facebook is a story of exceptional leadership. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg perfectly compliment each other, and the business has been able to attract truly exceptional talent- not just people who code but people who know how to run and scale businesses.

Q: What are the biggest areas of impact to invest?

[Naveen Jain] When choosing the areas I want to invest, I start with one basic question which is, ‘what are the biggest problems facing humanity?’ I then look at the technological innovations that are at my disposal. Why? It’s the convergence of technologies at any given time that allow individuals to achieve the things which simply were not possible before.

As more and more people buy smartphones for example, you can imagine the number of sensors on these devices is increasing. They’re becoming smaller, more complex and cheaper too. At the same time, you’re starting to see the bandwidth of connectivity to these devices increasing. Thirdly, they computing power on these devices is approaching a marginal cost of zero as you have massive computing power in the cloud, on demand. When you have massive bandwidth, massive computing power and complex sensors, you can start to do things that were never possible before. Your smartphone can be used to diagnose diseases for example – every disease has a pattern, and if you can use your smartphone’s sensors to measure inputs (ultrasound, temperature, pressure, blood, and so on) and put that data in the cloud to be analysed – you are able to find patterns and diagnose diseases like never before.

My new venture ‘Blue Dot,’ takes advantage of the inventions and innovations that are sitting in our research labs- places like NASA, our Universities and National Research Labs. We’re putting these innovations together to solve problems in all spaces. For example, why is it that we cannot easily tell whether someone has a bacterial or viral infection, this should be a trivially easy thing for us to do! Every single time you’re sick, you need to know whether it’s bacterial or viral so you know whether to take antibiotics. If we don’t get this simple question right, we’re going to end up with another massive problem – we’re going to end up back in the pre-medicine era, where people will die of common infections because our antibiotics aren’t working.

Space is also hugely exciting at the moment. Think about it.., only three superpowers have ever landed on the Moon. The United States, Russia and maybe China (I say maybe because they crashed, rather than landed). Now? A small group of individuals are doing things that previously could only have been achieved by superpowers. My venture Moon-Express is planning to land on the Moon next year, and just think about that – it means a small group of people have suddenly become the fourth superpower. Not the UK, Germany, France or a Fortune 500 company… but a small committed group of people. The cost? Under 10 million dollars.

Elon Musk has brought the cost of putting a rocket in orbit from hundreds of millions of dollars down to around $60 million. That’s not good enough… just look at entrepreneurs such as Sir Richard Branson, with LauncherOne, Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin or New Zealand based Rocket Lab who are building 3D printing Titanium rockets which can put an object in orbit for under $5 million. We’re getting to a stage where the marginal cost of putting an object in space is just the fuel; and that means it’s now not unrealistic to get to a stage where you could get to space for under $1 million, or even Mars for under $1 million.

The biggest cost of leaving Earth is the weight of the fuel. Think about this in terms of cars… you don’t buy a car with all the fuel you will ever need for your journey, you fill it up from time to time as you go places. What if we can create fuel-depots in Earth orbit, on the Moon and elsewhere. We could create fuel from the water on the Moon, or the gases in space and suddenly you don’t have to carry as much fuel and so the cost of getting into orbit gets even lower.

Q: What does it take for you to get excited about a venture?

[Kevin O’Leary] I don’t consider myself an ordinary investor anymore. I don’t care what the last round was valued at. This may sound arrogant, and perhaps it is, but I’m Mr. Wonderful. What I can do for businesses is remarkable, I have a huge team that supports social media, I can open doors for entrepreneurs that have been shut to them for years, I bring a lot of value to the businesses I work on and I want that reflected in what I put in.

The first thing for me is, how can I help that person? I have 44 companies in my portfolio- and with every single one, I’m constantly thinking – how can I help them? How can I make a difference? If I can’t add any value, there’s no point putting any money to work, but when I get behind it and put my name to it, I want it to be successful.

The first thing I worry about is this: if I get involved with this deal the last thing I