8 Entrepreneurial Lessons From A Two-Time Olympic Champion

Bet you didn’t know that playing sports frequently lays the foundation for women’s entrepreneurial success, according to From elite female athletes to exceptional leaders: For all the places sport will take you. Participation in sports correlates with leadership success. A whopping 80% of women executives played sports growing up, and 69% said sports helped them develop leadership skills that contributed to their professional success, according to From the Locker Room to the Boardroom: A Survey on Sports in the Lives of Women Business Executives.

Katarina Witt, two-time Olympic champion, is one such leader. She was the closing keynote speaker at the We Own it Summit, a conference advocating, promoting, and accelerating high-growth entrepreneurship for women. This year it was held in Philly and was convened by the Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs (AWE) and The Collaborative. I had good fortune to talk with Witt at the event.

Katarina Witt @ Geneva 1986 (Photo credit: zipckr)

It’s clear that Witt’s experience in sports has made her wise in the ways of the business world and that the life-lessons she learned can help other women entrepreneurs.

1.) Surround yourself with top-notch support: Witt said she hired the best coach. That’s an obvious choice for a high-potential athlete. To succeed, surround yourself with the best people. High-potential entrepreneurs would be wise to hire the best as well. That may or may not include a coach but it does include an accountant and lawyer. Make sure they’re experts in the issues that face vibrant entrepreneurial companies.

2.) Have grit: Elite athletes, such as Witt — and entrepreneurs —  know that perseverance, passion, and keeping an eye on long-term goals are the keys to success. “Going through the valleys makes you appreciate the hills,” said Witt.

Interestingly, academics are now finding that success is less about IQ, though that certainly is part of the formula, but more importantly about grit. Grit, as it turns out, is the quality that allows people to accomplish their goals. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, pioneered a study on grit. She found that successful people are more likely to agree with survey statements such as “setbacks don’t discourage me.”

3.) Use failure as a stepping stone to success: Witt fell and picked herself up many times before she was able to land four triple jumps and a double axel in her long form program at the Calgary Olympics. Entrepreneurs know that the road to success is marked by many stumbles.

Katarina Witt, Frankfurt, September 2009, (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

4.) Avoid labeling yourself a “failure” when you have failed: Just because you didn’t win doesn’t mean you are a failure. Witt made a comeback and competed in the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. She didn’t win a medal but her performance to “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” a tribute to the lives lost in Sarajevo, earned her the hearts and minds of the audience. She also received a Golden Camera, a German film and television award, for her memorable Olympic comeback. In the long run, coming in seventh didn’t hurt her professional career. Her performance endeared her to the public.

5.) Handle the heat: Taking center stage is part of high-level competition. However, sometimes adulation can go negative. When Germany unified, anger was aimed at Witt because she lived a privileged life and benefited so much from being a state-sponsored athlete.

Women entrepreneurs need to go for the limelight, whether it is warm or harsh. The visibility establishes your credibility, which will help you grow in the long run. But to attract media attention, you have to say something that hasn’t been said before. People may disagree with you and you may get called on the carpet, which isn’t comfortable for many women. Use Witt as a role model for how to stay mentally strong when disapproval comes your way.

6.) Function well under pressure: For Witt, bringing home a gold medal wasn’t just about being the best figure skater. It was her opportunity to earn money outside East Germany. During the Cold War, before the Wall fell and the borders opened, she was the first East German athlete to persuade her government to let her turn pro. If she didn’t bring home gold from Calgary, she would not have been allowed to perform professionally outside East Germany. Witt delivered.

7.) Reinvent to open opportunities: After the Olympics, Witt formed her own production company. She was both a producer and a star. Audiences loved it, but the company lost money. She now minds her money a lot more closely. Witt joined forces with other ice stars had a lot of success but then tastes changed and ice skating was no longer as popular as it once was. Witt went on to act, write, serve as a judge on Britain’s “Dancing on Ice” TV show, and lead the bid for the 2018 winter Olympics for Munich.

8.) Rest and recover: The Olympics aren’t going to Munich. Witt is taking time off. While I wouldn’t venture a guess as to what her next undertaking will be, the one thing I’m sure about is that it will be exciting.

Listening to Witt, it’s easy to see why playing sports builds the skills needed to succeed as an entrepreneur.  Let’s hear it for Title IX! Break down the barriers to sport for women and girls. It’s not because we want to get into the locker room. We want to get into the corner office.

From Forbes

After Her First Startup Blew Up, This CEO Went On To Build A $100M Company

Fresh out of college, Kim Reed Perell joined a startup that blew up, then just as quickly imploded when the dotcom bubble burst. Having learned what not to do, she began again – starting a $100M digital advertising company from her kitchen in Hawaii.

At 23, success slipped through Kim Reed Perell’s fingers. In a few dizzying years she’d been hired straight out of school to be startup, Xdrive Technology’s 7th hire and Director of Marketing and Sales. Apart from a brief stint on Wall Street, Reed Perell had no experience, but threw herself into aggressively acquiring members and monetizing the business through advertising.

Xdrive, a late ‘90s forerunner of Dropbox, was using the dotcom-era blueprint – accelerated hypergrowth, largely at the expense of cash flow and profitability. Within the first year, Xdrive had raised over $20M in funding and hired 120 employees. At the same time Reed Perell managed to acquire over 10 million members, generating over $9M in advertising revenue.

Kim Reed Perell, CEO of Adconion Direct

Meanwhile Xdrive quickly ballooned to 200 employees and was burning through the $120M they’d raised over several rounds between 1999 and 2000. Data storage costs were far higher over a decade ago and the company was hemorrhaging cash. Reed Perell found herself suddenly firing employees she’d counted as “her dearest friends” in droves.

Xdrive took a nosedive into dotcom-bust oblivion, laying off the majority of its employees in 2001 and eventually going bankrupt. After bankruptcy, Xdrive experienced some final death throes when the company was re-funded by an early investor to stay afloat while seeking a buyer.  The distressed company and assets were later acquired in 2005 by AOL AOL 0%, an original investor that later closed the company.

After she’d been laid off in 2001 Reed Perell moved to Los Angeles. “It was the hardest time in my life,” she says. “Xdrive was an amazing ride and a great time, but it ultimately ended in bankruptcy.”

But, “being an entrepreneur was in my DNA,” she says. Born to a real estate developer father and a mother who runs a communications consultancy in Oregon, Reed Perell says she grew up thinking about things from an entrepreneurial standpoint.

Her long-term boyfriend she’d met studying business at Pepperdine wanted to move back to his native Hawaii.  “I felt like if I could start a business in Hawaii, I could start one anywhere,” she says. Xdrive’s dazzling but short-lived trajectory had taught her several things, “specifically the importance of maintaining a relentless focus on the bottom line and learning how to bounce back from defeat,” she says. “There is a value in experiencing how very wrong things can go, being resilient, and bouncing back quickly.”

“I needed to get back to basics,” says Reed Perell. She started Frontline Direct, a performance marketing company from her kitchen in Hawaii. She frequently stayed up all night working and taking East Coast morning calls at 4 and 5 am, in between planning her wedding. Her relentless drive was a curiosity in Hawaii. “Everyone leaves work when the surf’s up,” she laughs.

Frontline Direct nearly doubled in revenue every year since its founding in 2003 and was profitable through its entirety.  Within two years, the company hit $3.5M in revenue with 63 customers and five employees, and eventually grew to over $100M in 2010 with 380 customers and 74 employees.

Cross-channel advertising basically means building a map of a brand’s audience across different websites and devices made up of the sites and clicks and actions, allowing them to deliver the right ad to the right person.  “Each channel provides incremental insights about a user, and aggregated together create more complete profiles about a brand’s users, and therefore, a more complete profile to buy media or audiences,” says Reed Perell.

“If a large number of people that like your brand on Facebook express that they like running, buying display media against running sites, or people that have been to a running site, is a reasonable action. The performance of the media will confirm this,” she says.

In 2008 Reed Perell sold Frontline to Adconion Media Group for $20 million, plus a significant earn out. Frontline was merged to create Adconion Direct and Reed Perell remains CEO. Today, based in Santa Monica Adconion Direct sees a 70% year-on-year growth based on ad sales. She remains adamant that founders today, in the midst of another possible tech bubble should think hard about taking outside funding and focus on building a profitable business from the ground up.

“It always takes twice as long and twice as much money than you think it will,” she says.

From Forbes

7 Magic Words (And 10 Negotiation Ideas) For Entrepreneurs

Of all the skills we teach prospective entrepreneurs, there’s an element missing. Where in our MBA or business preparedness programs do we talk about the skills of negotiation? Um… with the exception of sales training, which is highly focused on negotiation, perhaps the answer is never.

My friend Dr. Richard Kaye raised this point to me recently as we discussed our strategies for business at a recent Pro Speaker Biz event in Las Vegas, led by the head of Performance 360 Events and Performance Magazine, Dr. Jeff Magee. Dr. Kaye, Magee and I are fellow faculty members of the CEO Space business growth conferences (as a note, these roles are unpaid). In his business life, Kaye is a retired chiropractor who teaches and presents on how to build better rapport, better communication (here’s to that!) and better negotiation skills.

Dr. Richard Kaye is an expert in negotiation (Image courtesy of RichardKaye.com)

To that end, I am dedicating today’s column to negotiation—the set of skills that is at the core of every sale, work assignment, investment and monetary transaction, and at the center of our personal and family existence as well. In that respect, negotiation is everything – yet in our preparation for life and business other than in sales training we rarely give it a thought. Many entrepreneurs even dread negotiation due to the underlying premise that it is adversarial—the battle for dominion between opposite sides.

For starters, I would propose we end the adversarial thinking right now. The very act of conducting business is a series of partnerships and a discovering of synergies that are suitable to all sides. This is a welcome and wonderful activity. Without it, nothing occurs. And when it’s glossed over or done poorly… well, suffice it to say that this is where adversarial outcomes begin.

If we all negotiate all of the time, how can we do it better? Here are some top strategies, gleaned from my interview with Kaye and additional sources:

1. Know your objective. Ross Kimbarovsky, the co-founder of crowd SPRING, a Chicago-based digital agency that provides a virtual marketplace for freelance design and branding creatives, suggests that you take the time you need to be very sure of the bottom line objectives you need in order for a deal to go through. Have in mind a Plan B that would be your next best alternative if Plan A were not to go through. Without this preparatory thinking you may spend weeks in fruitless negotiation or could end up finding yourself tied to an unfavorable deal. For example, in negotiating the initial hosting agreement for crowdSPRING, he knew immediately when his discussions with Vendor A were unfruitful and within minutes was on the phone with Vendor B, who he had scoped in advance and who was able to make the concessions he needed.
2. Prepare. When it comes to an important sale or a job you really want to win (or to hire for), learn all you can about the other participant(s) in advance. You’ll gain helpful information about what matters most to the other person (and to their company). Think about the long term ramifications of an agreement as well (particularly important in investment decisions—there is far more to consider than the black and white ROI).
3. Learn to really listen. How many times in a dialogue do you and the other person in the conversation come away with diametrically opposite recollections of what was actually said? Far too often. We focus too heavily on our strategy, our needs, our fears and the next thing we intend to express to be genuinely hearing what the other person says with their words, and even more importantly what they express nonverbally. Be patient, and do your utmost to let the other party speak freely and to not interrupt.
4. Learn the 7 magic words. “What I might be willing to consider is…”  This is my very favorite bit of wisdom from Kaye. In actuality, you have agreed to nothing. In fact you and the listener may be at opposite poles when you make this statement, but by uttering these words you’ve elevated the conversation to a space that allows for a meaningful dialogue to occur and you’ve laid the foundation for give and take. Emotionally, these words move you closer to the same side of the table where together you can identify if there is a partnership or a deal to be had.
5. Never make the first offer. Another variation of this rule that you may hear is “He (or she) who speaks first, loses.” Kaye teaches more on this principle in materials from his website at www.richardkaye.com.  But in short, it’s important to recognize that stating the first offer puts you at an immediate disadvantage.  Your first offer (or price) may be so far out of the realm of the listener you may actually insult them. Allow the other party to speak first and you will learn invaluable information about their starting point and their frame of reference that will allow you to frame the conversation from there.
6. Never be intimidated. Kimbarovsky raises this point, which I love. A larger organization assumes a smaller team can be intimidated. They will tell you they have form agreements their legal teams will not allow them to alter. In many if not most of these cases, this is not true. In my own earlier days I was far too willing to agree to prices and terms (out of fear of meeting my own team’s payroll) that weren’t advantageous to our company. Likewise, I allowed pushy employees to go too far with unreasonable demands. These days I do neither. It’s not a question of being a bully, but remembering your own bottom line and being able to utter the words without fear or hesitation, “That won’t work for me,” and then articulate why, and what you’d need to proceed. Perhaps there is a workable alternative. With one major client, their ability to pay electronically on the 30thday of the month, no fail, made their other terms more workable and we stayed. Conversely, another organization we know was bullied into carrying more than $1 million in in vendor charges for one of their largest clients, a major national bank. It was a rich contract, but ultimately, the one-sided arrangement contributed to causing their business to fail. No matter who the participant is, if your terms aren’t possible, walk away.
7. Pay attention to perception. Get to know the people you’re negotiating with well enough that you are able to read their emotional reactions (which will also be helpful in managing and controlling the reactions of your own). Chances are, you have become skilled in reading the reactions of your own team members, Kimbarovsky and Kaye have both noted, but you will need to be equally attentive to the reactions and perceptions of the other parties you don’t yet know well.
8. Be authentic. Kimbarovsky notes that some people walk into a discussion with a set of “fake” needs they’ve trumped up that they can pretend to bargain away over the course of discussion, making it appear they’ve made major concessions when in fact they’ve conceded nothing at all. While this tactic can sometimes succeed, be very wary of disingenuous acts. Far better is a collaborative discussion that seeks to understand the interests and needs of both sides with accuracy.
9. Create multiple potential solutions. A mistake many negotiators make is limiting the potential outcomes to too few alternatives (although the opposite problem would be presenting so many possible alternatives that it bogs down the recipient with too many choices to make). But for the most part, negotiators tend to limit the options they provide too early, which closes off the opportunity for meaningful brainstorming and positive outcomes to occur.
10. Confirm the points of agreement and disagreement clearly. After each discussion, send a follow up message that articulates the positions of each party clearly. It can lead to a faster conclusion and can save valuable time that would otherwise be spent re-hashing the positions that you have already cleared. It helps the other party know that you are listening carefully and understanding them fully. It will also help you to prepare more beneficially for the next meeting or conversation you’ll have.

There are many more aspects to productive negotiation, of course, but if you haven’t considered the topic lately, these 10 points can serve as your start. 

 From Forbes

Great entrepreneurs don't follow the herd

The Smart Business Show takes place at the Odyssey Arena, Belfast on May 29 and 30

Have you ever watched an episode of Dragons' Den and tried to work out what made each of the Dragons a major success? You're not alone. Business people throughout the UK study the stories of great entrepreneurs likeRichard Branson and Bill Gates looking for the vital ingredient that led to international acclaim – and stardom.

Unfortunately, as many have found, it isn't a matter of one ingredient. In fact, the recipe for success in business has so many ingredients it's difficult to know where to start. Put simply, great entrepreneurship begins with genetics, which are shaped by upbringing, and finally moulded and crafted by choices and experience. While every great entrepreneur has a different life story, however, there are some common denominators.

Great entrepreneurs don't follow the herd, they have their own way of doing things. Working through complex problems and coming up with the right decisions, they trust their own instinct to make the final call.

They are also devoted to their business, often to the exclusion and thus detriment of other aspects of their lives. While most people work to live, great entrepreneurs live to work, driven by a burning passion for what they do – and to succeed.

They have no respect for the status quo – nor for those who tell them 'this is how it's done'. Great entrepreneurs honestly believe there is a desire for a product or they can find a better way to do something, and will ultimately prove it. They may not succeed the first time (in fact the average is 3.8 failures before success), Richard Branson being a case in point as his first venture failed, but they dust themselves down and start again. It's for that reason that many of the major moguls have a 'superhero' quality: quite simply, they are truly special.

You can find out if you've 'got what it takes' at the Smart Business Show, Odyssey Arena, Belfast on May 29 and 30. See www.smartbusinessshow.com.

From Belfast Telegraph

Risk, Reward And Worst Case Scenarios: How Entrepreneurs Like Richard Branson And Tony Hsieh Call It

One of the most fascinating things about entrepreneursis their attitude to risk.

Whether you see a risky idea or proposition as an opportunity or a potential disaster is arguably what sets true and wannabe entrepreneurs apart.

Many of those I’ve met over the years have taken decisions that had  the potential to damage or even destroy their businesses, soI had to ask, when it comes to risk, how do you know where to draw the line?

‘Screw it let’s do it’ may be his business mantra, but even a renowned risk taker like Richard Branson says there are limits.

Ahead of this week’s Virgin Pitch2Rich event in which he’ll judge six young companies vying for investment funding, with all the risks and challenges of business growth ahead of them, he admitted that protecting the downside was among the best advice he had ever been given.

“As an entrepreneur you should be willing to take risks and trust your judgement when you do, but you always have to think about the worst-case scenario,” he says.

He recalls the most critical situation where he had to strike that balance, launching Virgin Atlantic. It was at the height of Virgin Records’ success, with the likes of the Rolling Stones and Janet Jackson riding high in the charts, and profits rolling in.

“We didn’t really have the funds to start an airline, and none of my fellow directors agreed with me that we should do it,” he says. “Although I believed we could transform the aviation industry by making flying an exciting experience with quality customer service, it was a tough call whether to take the risk or not.”

Having negotiated with Boeing BA +0.64% to buy a plane, Branson was able to demonstrate to the Virgin Records board how, in the worst-case scenario, if Virgin Atlantic failed, they would only lose six months of profit.

“They agreed; and we’re still flying high decades later,” he says, with a tone that suggests when it comes to risk, most times he’d ‘screw it and do it’ anyway.

It is one thing to weigh up the risk and go for it. It’s another to simply not see things as being that risky; which seems to be Tony Hsieh’s take on it.

Maybe it’s just the Las Vegas’ high rolling culture, but the Zappos boss, who is swapping management hierarchy for holocracy in his own company, and self funding the transformation of Sin City’s old Downtown area into a brand new business community, to the tune of $350 million, doesn’t consider anything he’s done to be ‘super risky’.

“To me, the worst case scenario is not that bad,” he says, in his trademark laid back style. “I’m lucky to be living in a time and a society where I don’t need to worry about being able to eat or having a friend’s couch I can crash on if things don’t work out from a business perspective.”

Maybe that’s easy to say when you have billions in the bank. What about disruptive entrepreneurs who put their reputations and life savings on the line to shake up established industries?

For Dublin-based Kealan Lennon, founder of e-greeting card businessCleverbug, risk is inherently related to the size of the reward. With his vision of creating a $1bn IPO out of Ireland, he has already turned down several acquisition approaches.

“Maybe that will turn out to be a mistake, but it is a risk calculated relative to the potential reward and achievement of the vision,” he says.

Linda Cheung gave up her high-flying COO role at Morgan Stanley MS 0% to co-found social CRM and services business CubeSocial. As a youngster she had watched her father run his own business, so an entrepreneurial spirit was in part inevitable; but the risk?

She says: “My inner business sense tells me that risk is not a negative thing. Nor is it necessarily a positive thing, but more a challenge. Risk and reward have to be seen as a balance.

“I knew that I could forego earning an income for a period of time, and our focus during start up was on seeing connections, joining the dots, identifying the opportunities more than the risk. It is about seeing the glass as half full.”

After 23 years of entrepreneurship, German-based business coach Agnes Cserhati shares  asimilar view; instead of seeing  risk, spying  opportunity and challenge.

She says: “Most people thought I was crazy to move AC PowerCoaching from London to Bonn last year. It was successful, in an ideal location, with great contacts and opportunities. To me it was the perfect time to start disrupting the European market.”

Cserhati has also discovered that German attitudes to business risk differ from those in the US or UK. For example, German entrepreneurs have a tendency to be cautious about credit. The majority of firms are in the German ‘Mittelstand’or SME sector, which contributes over half of total economic output – and finances most of its investment from its own equity.

“From my experience, German entrepreneurs are extremely  innovative, but culturally  more conservative about taking risk,  compared to those in other countries.  That could explain why around 95% of all German firms are family-owned, and largely managed by their owner,” she says.

And that raises the issue of collective attitudes to risk creating barriers to innovation. As serial entrepreneur and chairman of B1G1 Paul Dunn points out, the word ‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French word ‘entreprendre’, meaning to undertake.

“For me that simply means ‘undertaking’ things that we believe can be done to create something magical. And you risk everything to get it done, but you never see it as risky; that’s for others,” he says.

And therein lies the challenge. As the business grows, teams are built, and collectively don’t want to take the ‘risk’ of doing new stuff. It is one of the reasons why innovation can and does decline in larger companies. And perhaps why increasingly we see companies rewarding ‘failure’ so that people are encouraged at every step to risk it all.

Dunn adds: “To quote Einstein; ‘Unless at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.’ Long may we entrepreneurs embrace and act on that thought.”

From Forbes

FailCon: Platform for tech start-ups that helps entrepreneurs overcome 'shame of failure'

Certainly FailCon, a global forum for

failed entrepreneurs to discuss the

experiences & lessons they learnt

 from unsuccessful ventures,

 seems to think so.

Ask any angel investor or venture capitalist, and they'll tell you that the chances of a start-up succeeding are less than 10%. The circumspect among them will say it is less than 1%. More pithily, as a senior partner in an India-focused venture fund who evaluates start-ups on an almost daily basis puts it: "You have better odds of winning at Russian roulette than this. It's a suicidal equation."

There has been enough anecdotal evidence to back the low success rate of start-ups, and a recent study by the Harvard Business School's Shikhar Ghosh has validated what most within the ecosystem already know. Ghosh's study says that at the least, 75% of all start-ups fail, depending on how you define failure.

If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing all their money, an estimated 40% of high-potential US start-ups fail.

And if failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment — say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow— then more than 95% of startups fail, according to Ghosh's research. Whichever way you look at the numbers, one thing is clear: the risk of failure of a start-up is much higher than the potential for its success.

So why don't entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investors talk about failure more? Or at least, more openly? Surely, failure is a valuable piece of learning? Certainly FailCon, a global forum for failed entrepreneurs to discuss the experiences and lessons they learnt from unsuccessful ventures, seems to think so.

Sharing Stories

FailCon was started in 2009 in San Francisco by Cassandra Phillipps, an event planner for start-up events, and Diane Loviglio, a cleantech start-up founder, as a one-day conference for technology entrepreneurs, investors, designers and developers to study their own and others' failures and prepare for success, in line with the "fail fast, fail cheap" concept whose proponents argue that it's better for entrepreneurs to realize early on that their idea isn't working and move on to something else.

In a format similar, though not identical to the TED talks, it is now produced independently in different countries under licence and profit sharing, funded by a rough mix of ticket sales and sponsorships.

It was held for the first time in India last year to limited success, but the producers haven't lost hope and are hosting another FailCon this June or July in Bangalore. India is one of the 12 countries that will host a FailCon in 2014.

"I actually think countries that have growing founder communities and are not yet opening up their eyes to the value of failure are the most important places to host this event," says Phillipps, speaking from California.

"You can't have a successful entrepreneur community without supporting risk-taking and the failure that can come along with it."

Phillipps says last year's event had "a small but passionate crowd". Some of the sponsors last year were The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) and Seedfund, but the local producers are trying to rope in Microsoft this year.

"It is hard to get people wanting to put their name on failure or ready to see the value of it, but those who attended responded saying it was incredibly valuable and a good first step with the community.Now we just need to get the word out to help it grow," says Phillipps.

According to Team FailCon India, "With the tech start-up ecosystem still young in India, it is important that entrepreneurs and investors develop the right mindset towards failure; that it's an important part of the start-up journey.

We can't afford to be cagey about our experiences with failure and see it as a taboo subject. We have to share our stories of failure with our colleagues."

Stigma of Shame

This is all very well in principle, but in a country like India, where failure still comes attached with a certain amount of social stigma, a healthy attitude towards failure may amount to wishful thinking. I found entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley better able to carry off their failures with elan — in fact, entrepreneurs who have a failed start-up (or two) under their belts, wear their failures almost as a badge of honor — and they are valued for that experience.

But most Indian entrepreneurs, despite holding Valley counterparts as their role models, treat their failures more as a matter of shame than a true-life learning experience.

And going by the number of ex-entrepreneurs that I spoke to in India who didn't want to be quoted in the context of failure, I'm inclined to think that the loss of social capital still counts for a lot.

"In India, social pressures and stigmas may be more pronounced. The amazing thing about Silicon Valley is the ability to share knowledge, especially around failures, and that people respect someone for trying and learning from their failures. The rest of the world basically derides failure rather than trying to learn from it," says Pankaj Jain, currently venture partner, 500Startups, a Bay Area-based seed fund and accelerator.

Jain relocated to India in 2007 to set up an online marketplace for domestic and unskilled labour — drivers, nannies, cooks — "a real life MBA, better than Harvard", he says wryly.

"The product was called Semblr. We had a site up and did a small pilot and realized the operational challenges needed a different type of expertise than I had. I tried for a long time to find a mentor and a co-founder but to no avail...Eventually, I ran out of money," he says.

He moved back to the US in 2013, and is using the skillsets he gained from his start-up experience in India to his advantage — in evaluating, funding, incubating and accelerating other start-ups.

Different Generations

Jain is probably right about the way Indians look at entrepreneurial failure and how it is different from the Bay Area. According to Phillipps, "the Valley is unique in its attitude towards failure. India is more like Tokyo or Paris," where more traditional businesses have existed for generations.

She should know, having co-produced Fail-Con from Tel Aviv to Tokyo. In a way, the response to FailCon holds a mirror to society's acceptance of failure and learning from it.

India, she says, is new to the concept of valuing failure and learning from it. "But the entrepreneurial community in India is beginning to unify and find its voice."

Founders need to understand the value of innovating quickly and pivot when faced with failure. "Failure doesn't mean that you should stop trying.

It just means you should start exchanging stories of what didn't work and when you decide it is time to let go," she says.

"Entrepreneurs need to hear from each other that it's okay to fail, it doesn't mean you're worthless. You're just like the rest of us, learning from our mistakes and building something bigger next time."

Phillipps agrees that there is a greater stigma towards failure in India "for two reasons: the start-up community is relatively new, so the wider business community doesn't understand its ethos, including its attitude towards failure. And in countries like India, the wider business community is older and more traditional."

This feeds back into the same loop of not understanding how to deal with a failed business. It's almost like a generational gap, made wider because the old are older and the young, younger.

"If you are an entrepreneur, you have to be prepared to fail well, fail intelligently and apply those lessons to your next attempt," says Phillipps.

Learning From Failure But not many ex-entrepreneurs will go for that next attempt, at least not immediately. Their risk appetite "declines dramatically with failure in India", says Ritesh Banglani, director, Helion Advisors, which advises Helion Venture Partners, a $605-million fund focused on early-stage ventures in India.

"We have the ability to track entrepreneurs over time, and most ex-entrepreneurs react [to failure] by joining large corporations or multinationals which provide them with salaried jobs and a stability that they may have missed," says Banglani.

"This could be due to family reactions, loss of social capital, or just plain loss of [financial] capital, where they've burnt through their savings and are done."

Jain agrees. "Generally, I think the short-term risk appetite goes down after failing. Most people retreat into a 'safe' job afterwards."

However, in the Valley, because there are enough support structures in place, failed entrepreneurs have the ability to share what they've learned, get feedback from others, and be given a chance by others.

A virtuous cycle gets established this way. "With broader community support available, a failed founder begins to find her risk taking appetite growing again and an ecosystem willing to support the next act," adds Jain.

But another pitfall that Banglani warns against is blindly applying the fail-fast, fail-cheap protocol to startups in countries like India, where the lead time for a project to reach fruition may be longer, due to its intrinsic red tape and bureaucratic nature, where ventures naturally take longer to take off, even though the cost may be lower.

"If you give too much emphasis on failure, you are bound to fail. Sometimes a long runway is needed for a project to take off and giving up too early and too easily can also be equally problematic.

There is a certain tension between early failure and the value of persistence that needs to be recognized," says Banglani. And although most entrepreneurs agreed that there was a value to learning from mistakes, they wouldn't go so far as to say that failure should be celebrated.

Stepping Stone to Success "The fear of failure should drive people to succeed as entrepreneurs, but shouldn't prevent them from becoming entrepreneurs in the first place.

However, even if a great entrepreneur does fail, the immense learning from that deserves to be shared with others," says Jain. "Generally, I think the idea of sharing failures and learning from them is a great idea. Too many people are embarrassed to talk about their failures. If we can help them get past the social stigma of failing and share their learnings publicly, a great many people stand to benefit."

But here's one thing that should be heartening for ex-entrepreneurs and those who are struggling with their start-ups: investors and backers actually have more confidence in someone who has a failure or two under his belt than a young, first-time entrepreneur.

The assumption here is that generally speaking, people learn from their mistakes and more importantly, it is better to have tried and failed than not have tried at all.

From Economic Times

Self-Made Billionaires Around the Globe: Where and Why They Thrive (Infographic)

"SuperEntrepreneurs" are the Cinderellas of the business world. They're the most entrepreneurial of entrepreneurs, the extreme rags to riches stories: they are self-made billionaires.

The London-based Centre for Policy Studies identified nearly 1,000 SuperEntrepreneurs from 53 countries by analyzing Forbes' list of the world’s richest people from 1996 to 2010. To qualify as a SuperEntrepreneur, a business person had to have earned at least $1 billion. The report did not include those who had inherited their billions, or inherited a smaller fortune and had grown it into a billion-dollar sum.

The goal of the report was to identify the government and policy infrastructures that best support these superstars of entrepreneurship. After all, these SuperEntrepreneurs are good for the countries where they run their businesses, often creating millions of jobs.

Hong Kong and Israel have more self-made billionaires than any other place, when considered as a percentage of total population. The United States, Switzerland and Singapore rounded out the top five.

Low taxes and low regulation are correlated with higher percentages of SuperEntrepreneurs, according to the report. Government programs to support entrepreneurship did not correlate with the percentage of SuperEntrepreneurs, the report found.

“The results indicate the American Dream – the notion that it is possible for individuals to rise to the top through effort, luck and genius – is not yet dead. Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs have created millions of jobs, billions of dollars in private wealth and probably trillions of dollars of value for society,” the report says. “Moreover, the American Dream is increasingly the Global Dream.”

Take a look at the infographic below to peruse further findings from the report, including examples of SuperEntreprenuers, their geographic distribution and descriptions of what supports SuperEntreprenuerial nations.

From Entrepreneur