Should You Take RISKS? (Jeff Bezos #AND Mohnish Pabrai)

Whatever it is that you want to do, you're— there's going to be risk in your life, and risk is a necessary component of progress. You can make any pioneering movements in the world of any kind, whether they be the geographical physical exploration that I've just been talking about, or whether it be a more cerebral exploration of a scientific field, or I bet you could ask that question of every speaker here, and I bet that every speaker here has taken substantial risks, whether it be intellectual or otherwise, to achieve what they've done.

People think that entrepreneurs take risk, and they get rewarded because they take risk. In reality, entrepreneurs do everything they can to minimize risk. They are not interested in taking risk. They want free lunches and they go after free lunches. And so if you study any number of entrepreneurs from Ray Kroc to Herb Schultz at Starbucks and to even Buffett and Munger and so on, what you'll find is that they've repeatedly made bets which are low-risk bets which have high-return possibilities. So they're not going high-risk, high-return. They're going low-risk, high-return. And even with Bill Gates, for example, the total amount of capital that ever went into Microsoft was less than $50,000 between the time it started and today. That's the total amount of capital that went into the company. So Microsoft you cannot say was a high-risk venture because there was no capital deployed. But it had high uncertainty. Bill Gates could have gone bankrupt or Bill Gates could have ended up the wealthiest person on the Forbes 400. And he ended up at the extreme end of the bell curve and that's fine. But he did not take risk to get there. He was comfortable with uncertainty. So entrepreneurs are great at dealing with uncertainty and also very good at minimizing risk. That's the classic great entrepreneur.

My intention with this video was to spread understanding, not fighting. I want you to see that it's not one point of view or the other. You can pull and learn from both, especially the one that you don't immediately resonate with. Embrace the genius of the AND.