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I started Idealab with a dream to make something like a modern version of Thomas Edison’s Lab where we could test ideas under one roof and then spin them off into separate companies. These companies would have their own management teams and their own equity pools, while at the same time benefitting from shared experiences and resources.
With lots of help from so many great people, my dream became a reality. We have come up with more than 5,000 ideas, started more than 150 companies, and had more than 50 successful IPO’s and acquisitions. We are most proud that we created more than 10,000 jobs and thousands of new entrepreneurs.
We learned lots of lessons - some great and some painful - and it’s my honor to share them with you here. If even one tiny bit of one of these lessons can help you be more successful, that would make me so happy. I love entrepreneurship, and hope that our lessons can help more companies and entrepreneurs to be successful and change the world in a positive way.
I am so grateful to all the people who helped me make the Idealab “experiment” work for these 25 years.
Sincerely,
Chairman and Founder,
Idealab
HAVE LASER FOCUS
Focus is how you, as a startup, can take on a bigger competitor.
You can have a narrow focus and outdo a competitor by specializing in one particular area. Now choosing that focus is very hard and very scary. I know as an entrepreneur, I often want to try more things or keep more opportunities open because it feels like that’s safer. It's almost like hedging your bets, by having more balls in the air or more chances for revenue to come in or more chances to win the customer. But in fact, it's the opposite of that, I learned that the very hard way.
In one of my companies, Knowledge Venture, I learned that as I continue to narrow the focus, the company did better and better. We did better and better because we could win against that customer base, more successfully, but also by saying no to things that we weren't as good at, the company succeeded more and more. It was a very difficult lesson to learn but a very valuable lesson to learn.
It’s always hard to choose the right focus but what I learned from that experience and others was that if you have a choice between three things that you're choosing between, it's even better to pick an inferior one, than to try and do all three of them. That even the wrong focus is better than being unfocused.
That was something that was very surprising for me to learn, very hard to believe but I really, really feel strongly that having laser focus is the keyway that a start-up with less resources can take on a much better resourced competitor.
Bill Gross discusses his entrepreneurial journey to solve climate change
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I started Idealab with a dream to make something like a modern version of Thomas Edison’s Lab where we could test ideas under one roof and then spin them off into separate companies. These companies would have their own management teams and their own equity pools, while at the same time benefitting from shared experiences and resources.
With lots of help from so many great people, my dream became a reality. We have come up with more than 5,000 ideas, started more than 150 companies, and had more than 50 successful IPO’s and acquisitions. We are most proud that we created more than 10,000 jobs and thousands of new entrepreneurs.
We learned lots of lessons - some great and some painful - and it’s my honor to share them with you here. If even one tiny bit of one of these lessons can help you be more successful, that would make me so happy. I love entrepreneurship, and hope that our lessons can help more companies and entrepreneurs to be successful and change the world in a positive way.
I am so grateful to all the people who helped me make the Idealab “experiment” work for these 25 years.
Sincerely,
Chairman and Founder,
Idealab