Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos - by Sarah Lacy

I started this book not sure what it was, but quickly found a very interesting study on entrepreneurs in other countries such as Brazil and India. The most interesting concept in the book is that current infrastructure prohibits innovation, and Sarah Lacy states, and correctly I believe, that countries other than the United States will prosper because there is no system to grandfather in, everything is wide open and possible. You also learn that if you want to start a business, most of us are starting with more than many of these entrepreneurs, so we should be able to do it easier, but perhaps that too is a handicap, as we avoid loss more than we do gain. Quick interesting read and made me think, which is all I ask of a book

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos

Quotes



The reality is that no place knows a big local market better than local entrepreneurs. The second advantage is that in today’s globalized world, money and talent don’t have boundaries; they flow where the opportunity is. And the flow has already started to the emerging world. The year 2009 was the first year that foreign-born admissions to top U.S. grad schools fell. It’s almost impossible to know what the opportunity cost would be if substantially fewer immigrants come to the United States, but it’s a clear disadvantage when it comes to entrepreneurship. One-quarter of successful Silicon Valley companies were started by immigrants. The final advantage is the hardest to quantify: These emerging markets and their entrepreneurs have nothing to lose. When a country, industry, or entrepreneur has nothing to lose, it is freed from all the normal restrictions of the way things are usually done.

Having nothing to lose gives one the luxury of starting with a clean sheet of paper and far more freedom to take risk—or, as it’s called in business circles, a greenfield opportunity. (- as mentioned earlier, the less we let the current infrastructure define us the better.)  The more disenfranchised a person is, the more incentive he or she has to upend the established order. The American dream is the very idea that having nothing allows you to take enough risk that you can achieve anything.

Emerging markets are not for those with a weak stomach. Life and investing there is difficult. There’s a cultural, business, and ethical quandary around every corner. As many of the Western world’s businesses and investors have already realized, however, the promise is just too big to ignore, especially given the flattening growth in the West.

In China, entrepreneurs have to build a company that can move incredibly fast, whereas in India, entrepreneurs have to build a company that can survive as a market moves incredibly slowly.

It’s not about technology or features or acronyms—it’s a way of thinking and problem solving, coupled with the internal compass to believe in the idea and the confidence and determination to carry it out.

Great entrepreneurs know an idea is just that. It’s the execution, the sleepless nights, the years living on the edge that create a billion-dollar business.

Because the cost of starting a Web or software company had plummeted some 90 percent since the late 1990s, it was a lot easier to bootstrap something than in the past.

Talent and capital are the two most mobile assets in the world. They’ll go to where they are welcomed and rewarded.

Simply put, ideas are just that; execution is what matters.

Most Chinese Internet companies win by innovating not around product, but like Tencent, around process and monetization. It’s where the Chinese entrepreneur excels, which is interesting because it’s where the typical Silicon Valley entrepreneur is the weakest.

Ideas are just ideas. Process wins in China. - ideas are cheap, execution matters

People in India will go without shoes or food if it means they can learn. - we should all share this trait

"Business model is easy, you just build something people want.” “Money is the easiest thing in the world to make.” “Competition is nothing. The day you get a brother or sister, your competition is born.”

Great entrepreneurs build from “nothing but their thoughts.”

Ciputra’s seven essential entrepreneurial characteristics: Passion, Independent, Market Sensitivity, Creative & Innovative, Calculated Risk-Taker, Highly Ethical Standard, Persistent. “It’s not by our genes, it’s by discipline,” he says

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos