Five Great Advices for Entrepreneurs

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Last week I was invited to the event Active Venture Partners Family Day. As keynote speaker we had Ashley Ward.  Ashley is a well know top manager, entrepreneur, motivational speaker and extreme mentor. As a seven times CEO over 26 years with four public offerings behind him, he has experienced extreme learning. He led the IPO of Orchestream in 2000 to its £1b market cap, and as MD of Cray Communications/Anite Networks led the turnaround and executed its sale in two parts to Cable & Wireless and Intel.

He gave us an amazing speech that really touched me. I would like to summarise it as

Five Great Advices for Entrepreneurs:

  1. The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself”, This one is coming from Jordan Belfort, the controversial real stock broker of movie The Wolf of Wall Street. 
  1. As you grow chaos is normal”: It seems that if your company does not have certain organisational chaos you are not growing fast enough or at least you are not reaching your maximum growth potential.
  1. Sell things that you only have in a powerpoint presentación”, in the software sector this is called vaporware. In the case of a big company it would be not very nice to do and could hurt the competition. However, in the case of a startup, you may have enough resources (if you sell it) in order to make the product real.
  1. Whatever you do, don’t run out of money?” Of course, if you run out of money many bad thing will happen: bankruptcy, been acquired by your worst competitor or suffer a tremendous down round from your investors leaving you with almost not shares
  1. Chinese Proverb; Fall down 7 times, stand up 8…” Success is a synonym of persistence. Many successful entrepreneurs have been in the verge of failure or had failed.

Thanks Ashley, ? I’ve really enjoyed!!

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