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What advice do you have for someone wanting to be an entrepreneur?

Becoming an entrepreneur requires more than a great idea. It's about mastering different skills like finance, marketing, and accounting. Understanding your industry, testing your idea, and knowing your weaknesses are also key. Remember, it's not just about the idea, but how you execute it.

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Video transcript

- So what advice would I have for someone who wants to be an entrepreneur? So everyone's path is different, so take anything I have to say with a grain of salt. But a lot of folks think of entrepreneurship as, "Hey, I have a new idea for a business," whether it's a restaurant, or a new technology company, a new social network, whatever it might be, and they put a lot of emphasis on the idea itself. And I think most entrepreneurs would tell you that a lot more depends not only on the idea but the execution of the idea, and really just how ready is the world, is the market, for your idea? And so my advice would be, especially if you're early in your career, try to build as many skills as you can, and to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a little bit of a jack of all trades. So know your finance. Know your accounting. Know your marketing, And you don't have to know it necessarily academically, but know it intuitively. Pay attention to how other people are doing it. Think about your strategy. And wherever your area of interest is, if it's to start a restaurant, get to know that business really, really, really well. Work at a restaurant at all levels. If your goal is to work in tech, work at some tech companies. Get to know that really, really well. Get to know not just the technology, not just the product management, not just the design, but the sales aspect of it. Get to know the management aspect of it. And the whole time that you're building yourself up, that you're working in industry and learning these various skills, make sure that you have some time to fiddle. The best entrepreneurial ideas that I've seen are the ones where folks get to know a space well through their craft, and then they have an idea, and then they're able to have a little bit of time to test out that idea, not only build it, not only prototype it, but put it out there somehow and see how it the market responds. And if the market is responding very favorably, if people are saying, "Wow, I want more of this. "How can I get it?" Then I think you're on to something. And all of those skills that you would have built up over those many years, not only will they help you execute on the idea, but they'll help you convince other people that you're ready to execute on the idea, which is maybe just as important, potential investors, people that you need to co-found your venture with, and also, my last point is know what your weak points are. As you experience all of these dimensions of starting a business, if you know that, hey maybe the marketing isn't my thing, know that. And then you could find someone who's good at it, who can complement you, if you're like, "Hey, I like the entrepreneurial side, "but scaling up a business isn't my cup of tea." Find great operators who can help you scale it up. So that's my two cents. Take it all with a grain of salt.