Failing Fast

In business school, one of my professors taught me something very important. He said that the difference between a winner and a loser… is that the loser hasn’t failed enough. Winning business owners, he says, seldom achieve success on the first try. I believe this to be true.

People always ask our founders how we manage innovation at Google. Newspapers and publications will print quotes and headlines like “top 10 things Google does to foster innovation”. The truth is, put quite simply: we have a very unique culture and DNA, one that has not existed before. To truly understand this, one has to actually live on the Google campus for some time. Read more

When you start living like an entrepreneur…

…you start developing habits that allow you to build the foundations of an entrepreneur’s mindset. That careful balance of preparation, skill, and opportunity. These behavior traits start to manifest themselves in subtle, yet important ways:

1. You start reading more about the subject. You look for role models who have made it Big. Donald Trump (The Art of the Deal). David Ogilvy (On Advertising). Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Stanford thesis on PageRank and how it works). Mark Cuban. Michael Dell. Warren Buffet. My list of heroes for entrepreneurs are two-fold – those in the valley (Tom Perkins, Larry and Sergey, the Twitter founders, my ex-CEO who sold his firm), and those in entertainment (Hugh Hefner, P.Diddy, Chris Angel). Most interesting is the story of Hefner. Borrowing against his furniture for $6000 at the age of 25, he launched the first issue of Playboy with the Marilyn Monroe cover. As his daughter Christie recalls, (Authors @ Google) “my dad never thought Playboy would become as global and as successful as it did. He just wanted to be good enough to not have to ‘get a real job’.” Read more

Authors @ Google

If you are buying a house, Lawrence Roberts breaks down what happened, and how to stick to real business values when evaluating a real estate property:

Launching PUA Lingo.com

Today Casual and I sat down and finished our marketing strategy for PUA Lingo. It is a beautiful site. Our goal is simple: to create a domain and online location that helped people find meaning and reference in this commercially driven world of seduction and pickup. Read more