One of the great things that smart people do is to talk with
other smart people, then tell us what
they learned.
Amy Wilkinson, an entrepreneur and lecturer at Stanford
Graduate Business School, is one such person. She traveled the country and asked some of the top
entrepreneurs in the county how they did what they did to make them successful.
The result is a fascinating book. It is about
200 pages and written in a style that just about everyone can understand and
glean some helpful “take aways” even if they are not in the technology
industry.
Reid Hoffman and Robert Langer are two of the fascinating
people she profiled. You’ve heard of Hoffman’s product – LinkedIn. Before that he helped launch PayPal. The other guy, though you’ve probably never
hear of him, could be even more important than Hoffman. From his laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., he
has founded 25 companies, many of which have grown to more than $100 million in
size.
Credited with pioneering the fields of controlled-release
drug delivery, and human engineering, he has licensed technology to more than
270 other companies and filed more than 800 patents. Yet when asked what he is most proud of, he
says, “My students. They’re almost like my own kids. I get so much appreciation
from seeing them do well.
One
of the things that I learned from these brilliant people was that they know how
to cope with failure. Lots of it. In
fact, they even expect it. They are undeterred by these failures and go on to
produce successes that earn them millions—sometimes billions of dollars—and make
our lives better in the process.
The
other important point I learned was the power of collaboration. It’s a product of old fashioned concepts like
teamwork and friendship. Even when some of these people were heading super
successful companies, they responded to requests from friends who were running
other successful companies. The result
was that all the companies became better
businesses and served the customers better.
Hoffman said, “If you tune it so that you have zero chance
of failure, you usually have zero chance of success.” About collaboration with people he says, “If
you focus on little things that you can do to be beneficial to others, most
people will care about you and be eager to help others. By focusing on how you
can help others around you, that has a mammoth benefit for you.”
