Why SEAN PARKER Believes Failure Leads to Success | Top 10 Entrepreneur Tips

I think there's also a restlessness that all really good entrepreneurs have, and it comes from curiosity. Because I usually get asked the question, you know, how did you succeed? And I really don't feel like I've succeeded. Entrepreneurs often fixate on one. They think their idea is the way it must be. And having a relationship with your audience gives you the freedom not to worry about all that other stuff. Are you trying to change the world in some specific way to solve a specific problem that sort of irks you? Team does not mean credibility. That's a mistake. It was just trial by fire. We were learning everything as we went. There are a lot of entrepreneurs in the world. There aren't that many serial entrepreneurs that we actually got a chance to work with. So many different types of cancerous and parasitic people. I think there's a real sense amongst tech entrepreneurs that we're living in a unique moment in history. He's an entrepreneur and philanthropist. He co-founded the file-sharing service Napster and was the first and president of Facebook. As of 2015, his net worth was estimated to be $2.5 billion. He's Sean Parker, and here are his top 10 rules for success. I think there's also a restlessness that all really good entrepreneurs have, and it comes from curiosity, wanting to understand the world, wanting to find some problem that's unique where you have a unique solution to that problem. And once you've done it in one industry, you're going to try to do it in other industries, and you're going to try to do it in areas that maybe are unrelated to business, like philanthropy or politics or some of these other places. What did you learn from starting so early, and what have you learned from your failures? Because I know that failures is kind of the only way you really learn, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I get— I usually— this is the correct way to ask the question, because I usually get asked the question, you know, how did you start succeed, and I really don't feel like I've succeeded. I feel like I've sort of failed systematically, at least in terms of my own goals and what I set out to do. But then somehow failure has kind of transformed into some weird kind of success that I wasn't really expecting. I think of the idea just as your approach to the market. What makes you different? Why you're going to win? And there's a million different correct answers to that question. Entrepreneurs often fixate on one. They think their idea is the way it must be because, you know, one day they were, I don't know, woke up from a dream and they were reading a book on some interesting topic and the idea came to them and it, you know, but they didn't consider all the other possible different ways you could approach it. So I see a lot of companies that basically have the same high-level vision and take a completely different approach. And it's like the practitioners of different religions. They can't all be right about everything. So remaining open to a large number of different possibilities, I think, is important. And being able to pivot. If you look at PayPal, they changed their business model 6 times before they figured out that internet payments, email-based internet payments on eBay, was actually the correct model. What I got from what you just said was that freedom is actually really important. Freedom to focus on what— on the things that are important, like creating good art and writing a great book and having a relationship with your audience gives you the freedom not to worry about all that other stuff. Because it's so tempting once you start, once you get a good thing going, to just sort of get sucked into the system and kind of mechanically go through the motions that's required to maintain your audience and, you know, continue to sell books. And you get really caught up in that. I think it pulls you away from the creative work. As someone who doesn't build content or make art, I know this even as a business person because I create companies. And I feel like at times you get pulled away from the creative work of actually designing your product, and you get so caught up in all of that other hoopla, all of that buzz, all of that hype, all the people. And it becomes a lot easier to sort of just coast. So I think that there's two types of people. There's always two types. There's two types of people in terms of the way they react to wealth. And I think some of it has to do with your initial motivations. Are you motivated by simply making money, becoming wealthy, status, prestige? Or is there some— are you trying to change the world in some specific way to solve a specific problem that sort of irks you? Or maybe it doesn't bother you, but you see the problem in the world and you realize that it ought to be fixed. And so depending on where you start out, I think it affects kind of where you end up. And so I've seen, I've seen, I've seen folks who make $1 billion and they say, that's it, I'm done, I'm getting off this merry-go-round, you know, see you guys later. And then I'm going to the beach or I'm going to help try to Africa to save the world. And then there's the, there's the people who see it as a scorecard. And they get trapped in this endless cycle of self-recrimination. That's a challenging word to say. It's a great Scrabble word, yeah. So they get trapped in this endless cycle where they don't feel like they're succeeding fast enough, and now suddenly they're comparing themselves only to other billionaires, and they're trying to, they're worried about their position on the Forbes list, and they'll never say it publicly, but you know, Privately, it's actually, it's totally explicit. Like, the conversations are about net worth, and the conversations are about whose dick is bigger than whose. So I think you can, there's just different ways that people react to it. And personally, I don't really see fault in either way. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with seeing wealth as a scorecard and trying to work your way up that scorecard, as long as you're not hurting people on the way up. What are the 3 things you look in an entrepreneur? Do you look at the idea or do you look at the person? Well, it's almost a cliché, but VCs talk about team, team, team, team, team. And team does not mean credibility. That's a mistake. That's a misconception. Team means, do we think this team can actually execute the vision? And do we think this team can create a compelling vision? Because oftentimes the vision that they initially present doesn't end up being the business that they create. So is there someone on the team who's a visionary, who's agile and nimble and can come up with lots of ideas? Is there someone on the team who's a great engineering leader who can recruit a lot of engineers? Is there a great core technologist who can build you know, the initial, initial technology, who's like a real hardcore developer. Is there someone on the team who can watch over the business, do deals, basically relieve all the other people of that burden of having to go and hire people and deal with human resources and operate the company and deal with legal and so forth? And in every company, the balance is different, but you have to get a complete team. And so most of the companies we see, we don't even get past the first meeting because we can see so clearly that their team is missing certain critical pieces. In the early days of Napster, Sean and I didn't— we hadn't developed the tools yet that we would have needed to get to a different outcome. We were learning everything as we went. It was our first company, so we were learning about corporate finance, we were learning about management, we were learning about intellectual property law. We learned more about intellectual property law than we ever bargained to know, than we ever wanted to know. It was just trial by fire. We were learning everything as we went. So, we didn't come to the experience, you know, it was our first time doing all of these things. So, we didn't come to the experience knowing the things we needed to know in order to control the outcome. We were— we essentially launched the product. The product changed very little over the course of 2 years. And we spent most of that time just reacting to external events. So we couldn't be proactive about controlling the outcome. We were only able to react to the things that were happening to us. There are a lot of entrepreneurs in the world. There aren't that many serial entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who have systematically started many companies. And I think, you know, some of that is just that the, the, the— well, first of all, if you do very well and you make a lot of money, when you look back on your experiences and running a company or starting a company, and there's almost a kind of disbelief in, like, how did I really, did I really go through that? Did I really deal with all of that pain and headache and hassle and intensity? And this is one of the reasons why people who are founders are often so bonded together like people who have gone to war. They'll never forget those experiences, but to get up and do it to do that again, over and over again, knowing full well each time exactly what you're in— what's in store for you. I think that is, that is more rare, and it definitely requires that you're not willing to rest on your laurels. I can't sit back and say, okay, well, I founded a bunch of companies, they've, they've been tremendously successful, therefore all my companies are going to be successful. I have to be as paranoid and as edgy about each new company. All the hiring that we did at Napster in the early days was so bad that we actually got a chance to work with so many different types of cancerous and parasitic people who were all trying to extract value in their own various manipulative and selfish ways that we were able to put together almost a like a biological taxonomy of, you know, crazy people, which has been very helpful to me in the future because now I can spot these people a mile away. And learning, you know, learning how to separate the sort of wheat from the chaff, the hucksters from the real deal, is something that every entrepreneur goes through at some point because you bump into people who have a big resume, a fancy title, a credibility, but they ultimately don't have any clue what they're doing and they're faking it too. I think there's a real sense amongst tech entrepreneurs that we're living in a unique moment in history, and that because of circumstances that were in some ways beyond our control, we've been able to do extremely well. And there's a certain sense of responsibility that comes along with that, a desire to, to try to give back back. And I'm incredibly lucky in that I've been able to be successful at a young enough age that I can shift my attention to trying to solve some of these bigger problems and to do it in a way that's fundamentally unselfish. Giving needs to be a full-time job. Thank you guys so much for watching. I made this video because Joel Nunez asked me to, so if there's a famous entrepreneur that you want me to profile next, leave it in the comments below and I'll see what I can do. I'd also love to know which of Sean Parker's top 10 rules rules hit you the hardest, is going to have the biggest impact on your business or your life? Leave it in the comments. I'll join the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon.