On April 11th, some of Silicon Valley's top minds flew 3,000 miles from San Francisco to Colgate University to kick off the college's entrepreneur weekend. CNBC's David Faber hosted a panel with
After the hour-long discussion, the guests judged three student start-up ideas "Shark Tank" style (David Fialkow of General Catalyst Partners hosted a longer "Shark Tank" session with eight more nascent companies on Saturday). Below are the top-tips and insights shared during the lively discussion.
What it takes to be a founder:
Ashton Kutcher (Katalyst): It’s all about the people. If it’s a good idea there are probably five other people trying to do the same thing. It’s never cut and dry, it’s never clean. People that you invest in are from all walks of life…but there’s one think that I think is common and it’s a person’s grit--their ability to work and overcome problems when most people quit and that’s really hard to find and special people have it.
Dan Rosensweig (Chegg): You have to have a very specific perspective of not caring about other peoples' opinions, believing in what you’re doing, being willing to fight through things—and that’s not for everybody. Most of the great companies that I’m aware of including [Airbnb], eBay and Skype were founded by individuals trying to solve a problem for themselves.
John Donahoe (eBay): I love the word entrepreneur, but it puts so much focus on an individual. If you look at the most successful start-ups, they always involve a team… like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. And often that team has complementary skills. What I look at is--do you have a great entrepreneur and a great leader… and can that person build a great team around them with different skills?
How to build a great product:
Brain Chesky (Airbnb): Get 100 people to love you… once 100 people love something, they will tell everyone they know and then it starts to spread. Spend so much time with a couple customers that they love your service... and don’t worry if it doesn't scale.
Dan Rosensweig (Chegg): There will be people that win and people that lose but the philosophy isn't to cause someone else to lose but open up an opportunity that causes many more people to win.
Tony Gates (Skype): It always comes down to having the right idea, the grit that Aston talked about and having the right people around. It’s never been better to do it than today, the barrier is so low… you have to tap into a thing, solve a problem in your life and go for it.
Ashton Kutcher (Katalyst): Just do something so well and have a product that’s so good that people have a genuine desire to share it.
Learn Constantly:
Brain Chesky (Airbnb): The most important thing you learn how to do is learn. There are two types of people, people that learn and people that know… the people that know are going to know what they know forever, and that’s all they are going to know. I think there is something really important to have the curiosity of a child.
John Donahoe (eBay): I had two realizations early in my career that have helped. One, no one cared about my career more than me. No one was going to figure it out for me, and I had to take responsibility for it my self—responsibility for my own learning, my own career... And instead of learning a lot from one person, I realized I’d have to learn a little from a lot of people. Every interaction has a learning opportunity. The smart people ask questions.
A final thought from Brian Chesky: "Every company we’re disrupting--they themselves at some point were the disruptive force."
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