HOW the World's Most Successful INTERNET ENTREPRENEURS Think - #SuccessClues

If you're looking for motivation to take bold bets, keep on going, and break through the noise with your business, then this video is for you.

It's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets.

Often your dream is— it seems like it's so, so far off, but if you just kind of focus on building stuff that you think is good and you keep on going.

And so the question is, is how do you break through the noise is a really, really key thing.

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe you have insane potential, and I want to see that thing inside you burst out into the world. I also believe that success leaves clues, and that if you study the people who've had success before you, you can emulate their success. And so today we're going to learn how the world's most successful internet entrepreneurs think. So coming in at number 1 is Take Bold Bets with Jeff Bezos.

One of my jobs as the leader of Amazon is to encourage people to be bold. And people love to focus on things that aren't yet working. And that's good. It's human nature. That kind of divine discontent can be very helpful. But you really, you know, it's incredibly hard to get people to take bold bets. and you need to encourage that. And if you're gonna take bold bets, they're gonna be experiments. And if they're experiments, you don't know ahead of time whether they're gonna work. Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure. But big successes, a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn't work. So, you know, bold bets, AWS, Kindle, Amazon Prime, our third-party seller business, All of those things are examples of bold bets that did work, and they pay for a lot of experiments. I've made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com, literally billions of dollars of failures, and you might remember Pets.com or Cosmo, or give myself a root canal with no anesthesia very easily, None of those things are fun, but they also, they don't matter. What really matters is companies that don't continue to experiment, companies that don't embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where they, the only thing they can do is make a kind of Hail Mary bet at the very end of their corporate existence. Whereas companies that are making bets all along, even big bets, but not bet the company bets. I don't believe in bet the company bets. That's when you're desperate. That's the last thing you can do.

Constant experimentation, guys. As you grow and evolve as a human being, you have to bring that to your business. I love the message. Okay, number 2 is solve big problems with Jack Ma.

We are not a company that normally China call— we call ourselves a company running a platform, a company that is running an ecosystem. We are almost everywhere. People say, Jack, you know, you are in the B2B and B2C, and you're calling C2B on finance and online payment, logistics, cloud computing. You are everywhere. Not because we're greedy, not because we want to do it, because we have to do it. If we cannot, if we do not do it, China e-commerce in the years will collapse. I remember 9 years ago when I started Alipay. People say, Jack, don't touch the financing sector because it's illegal, you may be in prison. And I, we told ourselves if we don't do it, the China e-commerce will always like a chat room. Everybody say it's a good thing and I don't pay, you don't get the things. So I say, well, put me in the prison. Let's make sure that Alipay, the payment solution, works. And people say the payment solution is such a stupid idea. It's an escrow service. I pay, you hold the money, and you get the things. You pay the money, if you don't get the things you want, return the money. They said it's a stupid product. And I say, as long as it solves the problem, I like stupid things, you know. Let's make stupid things smart. Keep on improving every day.

I love the message, let's make stupid things smart. It reminds me of something I tell myself every morning as I'm walking up my stairs. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to solve a $10 billion problem. Upgrade the level of your thinking, upgrade the problems that you're solving, and you'll have a bigger impact and you'll be more successful too. Okay, number 3 is Mark Zuckerberg. Keep on going.

You know, it wasn't so long ago that, you know, I was a student and, you know, sitting in a seat in an auditorium like you guys are here today, listening to I remember very specifically this time when Bill Gates came to talk at Harvard, and I'm just like, "Wow. How do you do that?" And— but, you know, the trick is, is that the media likes to sensationalize this as if you have some eureka moment or you— are some singular person who can build something on your own, and that's just not how the world works. You know, when I was in school, I built a lot of stuff that I just liked building. There was not a single moment when I— when I had some revelation that Facebook was gonna be awesome. That's not maybe how the media or movies or whatever would like to portray things. It's not— it's much less exciting. But the reality is I think most services in the world that reach the scale that Facebook has, you start off building something that you care about. And you don't necessarily think it's going to be that big. I didn't. I built Facebook, the first version of Facebook, for my college community because I wanted to be able to connect with the people at my school. And I remember very clearly talking to my friends at the time and saying, you know, it's— how cool is it that we have built this community for our school? You know, one day it's going to be awesome when somebody else builds this for the world, because something like this needs to exist for the world. But it didn't even occur to me that, you know, my friends and I might be able to play a role in doing that, right? Because we were college students, right? I mean, we didn't have any, you know, engineers to work with or servers or resources or anything like that. And, you know, there are these huge companies that deliver products for hundreds of millions of people, right? There's— you know, I always assumed that it was gonna be like Microsoft or Google or someone would build this for the world. And what basically just happened is at each step along the way, we just kind of kept doing the next thing and growing from there. And, you know, there were teams inside these other companies that— that thought social media was important and were working on it. But, you know, there were all these different memes and narratives in the world. You know, people would say, "Oh, well, you know, this is just a fad. People are gonna use it, but then they're gonna stop." So, you know, so a lot of the teams who were working on it didn't take it that seriously, or, you know, the higher-ups in those companies didn't care, so they didn't get resources, and we just kept going and going. And then people would say, "All right, well, all right, fine. So maybe people are using it, but, you know, It's never gonna make any money, right? I mean, social media doesn't make any money. And we just kind of kept going and going, and then pretty soon we had a service that was bigger than any of these other ones, and that kind of is how we are here where we are. A lot of times I think people just get afraid because, you know, often your dream is— it seems like it's so— so far off. But if you just kind of focus on building stuff that you think is good and you keep on going at each step along the way and don't let people deter you from that and you just really care about what you're doing and kind of don't give up at each step along the way, then, you know, I think that's how you build something good.

You know, I'm a big believer in dream big but act small. You have this big goal that you're shooting towards, that you're aiming towards. It may seem impossible, impractical, but every day you're actually doing something to make it happen on a tiny small scale. You're slowly building those steps bit by bit by bit by bit. Usually the successes don't come from a giant thing happening, but all these tiny little things that eventually accumulate over time that if you look back looks like this big giant step, but it's not. Think big, act small. Okay, number 4 is Believe in People with Pierre Omidyar.

I started this just with the idea of let's bring the power of interactive technology, you know, the web, to ordinary people. And, you know, and I had this firm belief, which I still believe, that people are basically good. And as I said, if you treat them well and if you treat them with, you know, benefit of the doubt, you're not going to be disappointed. And in the modern world, despite, you know, we're bombarded with negative images all the time about how bad the world is, how dangerous the world is, and it is true, there are some dangerous There are some bad actors out there, but the vast majority of people out there are just good, decent, honest people.

I really love how Pierre is always pushing that message because nobody's doing it enough. For eBay to work, this guy founded eBay, you have to trust in people. Trust that that package is going to be sent when I've paid money. You're not dealing with some big corporation, it's an individual person. And if people are not basically good and trustworthy, Not that there's not some bad apples, but if people on a whole aren't good and trustworthy, then eBay doesn't exist. It doesn't work. And so it's awesome to see— it's great to see that company take off and do well on this foundational premise that people are good.

I love it.

And I love that Pierre is kind of feeding that ethos. Okay, number 5 is Don't Chase Money with Larry Ellison.

We started with 4 employees. And our goal was to get to 50 employees. And the goal really was not so much to make a lot of money. I wanted— to me, a lot of money in those days was I wanted to own a house, I wanted to have a nice car, and I wanted to work with interesting people and do interesting things. And I thought if I could control my own environment, have a small consulting company— and Oracle started out as a software consulting company. We worked for Tandem Computer, if anyone remembers those guys. We worked for IBM. We worked for a lot of different tech companies in Silicon Valley doing contract programming, fixed-price contract programming. And we did pretty well, actually. And again, the idea was just to have a small software contract software company. A bunch of, you know, we thought we were hotshot programmers and we thought we could make a decent living doing just that. And quite by accident, we built a product.

So this is pretty close to the Zucks message too around you just keep going, you just keep building, you're doing the thing that you love, you're not just doing it to try to make make a lot of money. And by continually putting in the effort and putting in the work day after day after day, amazing things happen. And it's so interesting to see how many times a business changes along the path of success. So Larry Ellison started off just doing consulting and turned into a product. Zuck started off just doing it in his dorm room and it became a much bigger project. A lot of times the plan you have at the beginning is not the plan end up with. It very rarely is. That start plan is very rarely the thing that takes you to the ultimate success. But don't worry about it. Like, just get started and keep going every day. Follow the thing that you love doing, and you keep doing that day in, day out, you'll have success. Alright, number 6 is set big goals with Larry Page.

A lot of times my issue is people are not setting goals that will be something that Somebody who becomes rich or could do anything, you got to be excited about working on that for 10 years. So you got to have a big enough goal that, you know, you attract the best people and you retain them and you keep them focused. And then my experience, you don't go wrong, you know, maybe you don't hit it next year or maybe you fail entirely and you discover something more exciting to work on with the same set of people.

Yeah, setting huge goals is so motivating as an entrepreneur. I remember reading the biography of Ted Turner, and his father killed himself when Ted was young, 18, 19, something like that. And Ted Turner's dad basically set a goal for himself, he reached it, and he was depressed, and he killed himself. And so Ted Turner decided that he would set goals that he would never be able to reach so that he would never be depressed, because there's always something to strive for. Search for, and it's what I'm doing now of trying to solve the world's biggest problem: untapped human potential. It's an impossible goal. It will never happen. There's always more potential, and that fires me up. You should get excited every day by the goal that you are out there trying to solve, right? Your big mission, your big vision. What are you trying to do? And that idea of trying to empty out the ocean with a ladle, something impossible to do, and you just get up and do it every day. It motivates you, your team, the people around you who want to come on board and help you. So important. Larry, man. Nice. All right. Number 7 is Push Until It Hurts with Travis Kalanick.

If you get to a place where it's easy as an entrepreneur, it's about to get really, really hard. And so what you find is with really good entrepreneurs, they're constantly making things difficult for themselves. And it's pushing. I like to say you push until it hurts. Or you sort of, you want to be always pushing beyond what you're comfortable with. And you're sweating just a little bit all the time. And when that happens, when you're constantly pushing beyond what you think, what you know is possible, you're always sweating a little bit. And you're always a little bit nervous. But that is the drug of being an entrepreneur. And so when you're pushing like that and you're never really relaxed, then it always feels small. And so in many ways it feels to me the same now as it did at the beginning. Still a little nervous.

I really love this message, and I think it's important that you have an environment or habits or people around you that push you to want to do that and, and stop racing against 3-year-olds. Typically it's easy to build a company to a certain size sides and then get bored and get complacent and it's easy and then you stop pushing. It's really hard to make ourselves be hard on ourselves to push and do more. It's why you're more likely to have success in a gym with a personal trainer who's saying, "Go, go, go, push harder, you can do it, that extra set," as opposed to you going out and working out on your own. And so if you don't have that accountability partner, I get it from the videos, I get it from my environment, I get it from the book, right? I get it from surrounding myself with these successful people that I feel like I'm doing just insanely small things, and it's not a push down, it's a push forward to say I can do more. I want to make it harder on myself. I gotta stretch the comfort zone, make it painful so that I do my best work. Okay, number 8 is Always Be a Startup with Brian Chesky.

You know, Paul Graham, I used to— he was our first investor, and I used to worry about all these random things like competitors, you know, kind of cities, all the stuff. And he said something to me I'll never forget. He said, Brian, startups die of suicide, not homicide. All great companies that had a downfall, they died of self-inflicted wounds. So what are those self-inflicted wounds?

That's a horrible thing to say.

I know.

But anyway.

But it's really the key thing is it's about like, there's this thing that like, you're a small company, and you exist because no one else, especially big companies, couldn't do what you can do as a small nimble company. Pablo Picasso had a saying, the older you get, the stronger the wind gets. It's always in your face. It's like small companies become big companies, and sometimes they become really bureaucratic. The culture gets lost. People leave the company. That is something that's not unique to Airbnb, but that's a thing that we have to worry about. I'm deeply paranoid about that. I want to make sure that we're always a startup, maybe the world's biggest startup, but you stay a startup.

[Speaker] So you're scared of yourself?

[Speaker] You have to be afraid of what you might become if you're not, if you relax. That's for sure.

[Speaker] I think that's a great message for big companies who need to be more nimble and aggressive. For you guys watching entrepreneurs, remembering that that nimbleness is your advantage. That's how you beat Microsoft. That's how you beat the giant corporations. Thinking about the Zucks, the third clip, he's saying that he expected Microsoft to make the Facebook, right? He didn't expect to be able to do it himself, but all these giant corporations were too slow. They didn't take it seriously. They didn't have the commitment to it. And so that startup mentality, you may think, I don't have the resources, I don't have the connections, I'm brand new. Nobody wants to listen to me. Like, that nimbleness is your advantage. And yes, some big company could do what you're doing, but they're too slow. They don't know the industry like you do. They don't have the passion that you do. And so instead of just seeing that as a negative, turn that into a positive for you, because the big companies, they want to be like you. Okay, number 9 is Break Through the Noise with Reid Hoffman.

The number of companies that really matter every year is probably between 0 and '05, right, in terms of like the industry changing. So if you look at an audience like this, which is what, 1,400 people, 1,700 people, you say it's an average of 2 founders per company, presume everyone's doing that, you got 850 in the room, right? And so, and that's only the people who are here, let alone everything else. And so the question is, is how do you break through the noise is a really, really key thing, whether it's financing, talent aggregation, go-to-market, etc. So how that then becomes a central problem. So one of them is, is to say, well, do something very contrarian. Do something that is kind of like not like where people say, well, you know, it's, it's, it's Airbnb but for dogs, right? You know, or that kind of thing is not the kind of thing to do generally, right?

It's very rare that those ever become the big companies.

Yes, extremely rare. Um, the second thing would be is to look where— really look where— and this is one of the reasons why both you and I are fans of Peter's question of, you know, what do you believe that other people don't? But look where other people really aren't, right? Like whether it's, you know, hard science or if it was 2.5 years ago, Bitcoin, you know, etc., you know, those sorts of things where like, no, no, actually something could be really big here because by the way, if you end up being right, you end up having access to the talent that's really focused on that. You have a ramp to actually get a whole bunch of stuff and get a big head start. From other possible competitive efforts and these sorts of things.

Again, a super important message for entrepreneurs just getting started: you are different, you are resourceful, you are unique, you are you. You've got to figure out what that secret sauce is for you and bring that to your business. You know, your one word, what do you stand for? And yes, we want to model success. Yes, we want to learn from Jobs and all the people that you might look up to, but you have to take that advice and then manipulate it and twist it so that it fits for you. If all you are doing is being a carbon copy of somebody else, the best you'll be is just a junior somebody else. Where you want to take all these bits of advice and make it unique to you to help you be the best you. And be, be bold with that. Love your differences. That's the thing that's going to help make you stand out compared to everybody else. Stop trying to fit in and start trying to stand out. And last up at number 10 is make sure that people How do people align properly? With Peter Thiel.

One part that I'm always very focused on is sort of the structure of these companies and how well are people aligned. And so you can, and making sure that people are aligned properly, not just that they say they are. I think this is sort of a very legal kind of a framework to think about what are people's incentives, are they going to be aligned or not? And I think you want to both have formal alignment where you set the structure right, and you want to have informal alignment where the people would naturally try to work together well in one way or another. And I think that somehow tends to get obscured in all these other ways. You know, there's always a prehistory question I like to ask founders. Of companies, which is how did you meet, what's the prehistory of the company before you got started? I find that to be a really instructive set of questions to ask. A bad answer is something like, you know, we met a week ago at a social networking function, at a business networking function, we decided to start a company because we both wanted to be entrepreneurs. You know, that's like saying, I married the first person I met at the slot machines in Las Vegas, and you might hit the jackpot, but it's probably a really bad idea. And a much better answer is, you know, we've been talking about this for a long time, you know, maybe one of us is more on the tech side, the other one's more on the business side, we have these sort of complementary skills, and so I think this question of alignment and structure is incredibly important.

I think if you look at some of the most successful companies and the founders and how they got together, you'll see that they knew each other for a long time. They were friends growing up, or they were friends in university or college, and they were working and tinkering, and the idea of starting a business came, but it wasn't necessarily to go off and build a giant corporation. They just loved what they did, and they had a natural connection with each other. I think another way to do it is figuring out your core value, right? Your one word, like, be able to attract people to your business partners, suppliers, employees who feel the same thing that you feel, who are on the same mission that you are on as well. And it's not just about trying to make a boatload of money, but trying to make a positive impact in the world. Getting those people on board who believe the same thing, you can go so much faster. So that's my take on how the world's most successful internet entrepreneurs think. I'd love to know, what did you guys think? Which clip was your favorite and why? I think my favorite was And number 7, push until it hurts. Just that constant reminder that I need to do more, I need to be better, I need to push myself beyond what other people expect of me and set new standards for the industry. I love that message and makes me want to grind a little bit harder. Which one did you guys like? Is there an 11, 12, 13 that you want to add to the list? Let me know in the comments down below. Thank you guys again for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, see you soon.

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The most important word ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you or that sums you up or that would be kind of like a little beacon.

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