Entrepreneur Magazine December 2021

REPEAT AFTER ME: “I will do the best work with the resources available.” This has become my mantra. It isn’t sexy. It doesn’t make for a great motivational poster. But it is true and honest, and I think of it often. It’s also what I repeat every time someone tells me they’re stressed-out, with too much to do—and it always calms them down. I hope this mantra can do the same for you. I’ll walk you through it. The first part is obvious: “I will do the best work.” Of course you will! We don’t work to be average, as NBA Hall of Famer Chris Bosh once told me. The second part is where all the power lies: “With the resources available.” Let’s be frank. Unless you’re the CEO of Apple or Google, you do…

Some entrepreneurs live by a kind of oral tradition. They think out loud and share ideas with colleagues but rarely write them down—for themselves, or for others. “That’s sort of stupid,” says Ray Dalio. As the founder of Bridgewater Associates, where he built a multibillion-dollar asset management company, Dalio very famously kept his notes: They formed the basis of his 2017 New York Times number one best-seller, Principles: Life & Work. But he firmly believes that anyone, at any level, should be recording and sharing their ideas like he did. “Think about all the different successful people, and their recipes for success, and their recipes for encountering problems. I wish I knew about those things, because they’re learning lessons,” he says. Today, Dalio is also the founder of Principles, a people-management…

1/Broken promises burn bridges. “Six months after I cofounded a small activewear brand, [e-commerce site] Carbon38 placed an order with us. This was a dream come true, so even though I was unsure we could execute on their timeline, I went for it. As a result, we didn’t let our fabric sit long enough before manufacturing and sent Carbon38 product that was too stiff and rough to sell. They returned all of it, and I made a terrible first impression. I learned to never compromise quality.” —KASSIA DAVIS, founder and CEO, KADA 2/Stinginess is shortsighted. “In the early days of Hims, I negotiated with vendors until there was no more room for savings. I was proud of this. But years later, an early Hims employee emailed me about the super-uncomfortable conversations I used to…

I have built two companies and am now growing my third, Hark Audio. Often, people wonder how serial entrepreneurs like me continually come up with new ideas, and my answer is this: Starting a business doesn’t always mean starting from scratch. If you have a powerful, foundational insight about something people love, you can make a career out of building concepts on top of it. Dennis Crowley did something like this. His obsession with location-based social media led him to form Dodgeball, which he sold to Google, and then to cofound Foursquare. Similarly, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth were passionate about finding new and more intimate ways of connecting people, which led to multiple failed startups and then one that hit: Clubhouse. And me? I was the kid in high school who…

The company Parting Stone offers a novel service: It turns the ashes of deceased humans and animals into pretty little stones—like river rocks. And when Justin Crowe founded Parting Stone in 2019, it seemed obvious who his first customers should be. “Our research showed that while 1.6 million American families choose cremation through a funeral home each year, there are already 75 million people in the United States living with pet and human ashes at home,” he says. In other words, Crowe planned to skip the hassle of persuading funeral homes to offer Parting Stone’s “solidified remains” as an alternative to traditional cremation. Instead, he’d sell his service directly to those 75 million consumers with an urn in the basement. But when the company launched, things didn’t go as planned. Crowe had…

Business leaders are often fascinated by military tactics, and with understandable reason: They see themselves as waging battle against challenging incumbents and evading minefields in the marketplace. But there is a radically different, equally important way of understanding business—and it often goes overlooked. It is the way business mimics biology. Bruce Henderson, the late founder of Boston Consulting Group (BCG), wrote about this concept in 1989. He insisted that a plan of attack created purely through logic and imagination was insufficient to win in the real world. A successful strategy had to recognize the complex web of natural competition and laws of nature that govern competitive advantages of all species—including people, who compete primarily with each other through commerce. Fast-forward a few decades. Our collective knowledge of biology has improved, and we…