Travelling to Silicon Valley

I was Skyping with one of my best friends (Alex) earlier this week in order to catch up on what we had done over the past month, and we both had one helluva time! Now Alex, as the title suggests, was lucky enough to go to Silicon Valley with his fellow university students, where he visited numerous companies and met some very interesting people, such as Tim Draper!

For those of you who do not know, Tim Draper is a venture capitalist with a net worth of 1 billion dollars and was one of the earliest investors in Tesla. So he is a pretty amazing guy and Alex shared the wisdom he had received from him which I will go over below. He said that there are:

Three Things to Forget

1. Being Humble 

Draper said that one needs to “Be arrogant. Sell yourself”. Draper was talking about this in terms of entrepreneurship and investment, but this is important in every aspect of life.

You have to show off! Show ’em what you got!

2. The Impossible 

Nothing’s impossible. Except for things that break the laws of physics, of course. (BUT…Technically it would be possible to create a virtual world where you could change the laws of physics…)

3. Being Realistic 

This ties in with his second point. If you would have asked people 200 years ago whether it was realistic for humans to create machines in order to fly, they would most certainly have said no. It was “unrealistic” until the first person created an aeroplane.

Was it realistic that humans would create iPhones or skyscrapers? No, but it started with people who did not accept reality as it was and decided to try. People who did not accept the status quo and made a decision to fucking do something about it!

Fuck Stability 

Draper explained that we should not settle for stability, and pursue what we want. When you are setting up your own company it will be incredibly tough and you will experience emotions that you have never felt. However, you will come out the other side with an experience that you could never get from attending a class or completing a degree. He even said that if it does not work out it will still have helped push the world forward. This is something which Elon Musk has echoed in the past, where he said when he started SpaceX he knew the chance of his company surviving was very low, but that even if he failed he would have helped push the world forward.

It’s Not About the Idea…

That great idea that you might have means absolutely nothing if you do not execute it properly. Numerous people have most likely had your idea, but you need to be more determined and do it better than the other people in order to succeed.

Finally, he said that entrepreneurship is one of the loneliest professions… but I’ll let you think about that one for yourselves.

(Beat. Exit Scene)