3 Steps to $30 millions, Yahoo bought 17 year old Nick D’Aloisio’s iPhone app

This week Yahoo bought 17 year old Nick D’Aloisio’s iPhone app, Summly, for $30 million. When Yahoo was founded in 1994, Nick wasn’t even born yet.

What’s he doing with $30 million? As Nick says, "I can't even buy a car because I don't have a licence yet." So he’s going to buy a new bag. Why? “Mine is broken; it’s old and the strap’s not working.”

3 STEPS TO $30 MILLION

Nick’s app has delivered over 90 million news summaries in the four short months since he launched it on his 17th birthday in November. But Nick isn’t even old enough to be a Director of his company, so his mum is the Director while he sits in as Company Secretary.

What has gotten Nick to success so quickly in 15 months when so many of us are still struggling after 15 years? Here’s 3 steps his journey has in common with most super-success stories:

PROBLEM + PASSION = $300K SOLUTION

Nick’s Summly App was the solution to a real world problem that no one else was solving well. As Nick relates, “I was 15 years old and I was revising for some kind of history exam. The problem was I was trying to find information that was useful to me.”

Searching Google on his phone didn’t give him enough detail to know what was or wasn’t a useful link. So he put his own iPhone app together. The app quickly rose up the download ranks and Apple featured it in their store.

Then came a fateful email: “About a month later, the private fund of the Hong Kong billionaire Li-Kashing cold emailed me and expressed an interest to invest, but they didn’t realize I was 15...It turned out that they actually liked my age because it demonstrated I was net-native, so I’d only grown up with the Internet. They flew to London about a month later and invested $300,000. That kick-started this whole journey.”

$300K FUNDING + EXPERTISE = $1.3M REPUTATION

Nick used the money to bring in world experts to help relaunch the app. At 16 years old, he teamed up with the leaders in Natural Language Processing, Stanford Research Institute (Who create Apple’s SIRI - named after the company’s initials, SRI).

In between high school classes in London, Nick worked with SRI in the US by phone and text messages to build the new app. SRI’s solid reputation and Nick’s focus on approaching well known celebrities to help him attracted high profile investors Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher and Yoko Ono who invested $1.3 million. Nick made the most of his investors, with Stephen Fry starring in the launch video for Summly.

$1.3M REPUTATION + SINGLE-MINDED FOCUS = $30M STORY

With world class partners and world class investors, Nick gave up full-time school at the end of 2011, with his parent’s blessing: ““I talked about it with them and my headmaster and we decided it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it would be silly not to run with it. Now, looking back, I can say it was a massive gamble. But it was a good gamble.”

From a standing start to $30 million, Nick has taken the age old 1-2-3 formula of solving a problem in a smart way, then using the resources he attracts to bring in the best talent, and leveraging that to attract the most influential partners.

What made him think he could just go and knock on the door of the best companies and most well known people in the world? As he says "I was naive. I didn't know I couldn't."

Nick is now reflecting on this week’s news: “Numbing is probably the best word to describe it. It’s a shock to be honest. The only thing I can take from this is that I’m genuinely kind of proud that I’ve been getting a lot of tweets where young people are commenting and saying, “This is really inspirational, I want to go and start my own thing.”

How many of these 3 steps in the 1-2-3 formula have you taken in your business? What can you do to upgrade your product, your talent or your partners?

Or maybe it’s time to be a kid again, be naive again, when you didn't know you couldn't. And start something entirely new.

If The World Were A Village of 100 People...

Our world population of 7 billion as a village of 100 people:

Here are our mother tongues:

12 speak Chinese
5 speak Spanish
5 speak Hindi or Bengali
5 speak English
73 speak the other 6,000 languages

Here is our wealth:

1 owns 40% of the wealth
6 own half the wealth
51 live on less than $2 a day

Here are our religious beliefs:

33 are Christian
22 are Muslim
14 are Hindu
7 are Buddhists
2 are Atheists
(And 33 believe in witchcraft, ghosts and aliens)

Here are our homes:

51 live in cities and can’t see the Milky Way
25 live in substandard housing or no home at all

And:

7 can’t read or write
10 have no job
11 have a vehicle
13 don’t have safe drinking water
14 are on Facebook
64 don’t have Internet access

If you woke up each day in this village, and knew each of the other 99 villagers personally, what would you do differently?

“I can do things you cannot, you can do things I cannot. Together we can do great things.” ~ Mother Teresa

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.” ~ Mark Twain

Jamie Vardy’s amazing story from underdog to champion:

> Jamie had dreams of being a footballer, but was rejected by Sheffield Wednesday F.C. when he was 16 for being too small

> Not giving up, he went to work as a labourer in a carbon fibre factory, working 12 hour shifts, so he could join 7th division team, Stockbridge Park, spending 3 years earning £30 a week.

> At 20 years old he was convicted for assault after a pub fight, but kept playing football, and had to play for 6 months with an ankle bracelet and a 6pm curfew.

> In a world where footballers are transferred for millions, he was transferred to Halifax Town for £15,000 in 2010.

> At 25 years old, he was sold to Leicester City in 2012, a team that have never won the Premier League. He only scored 4 goals all season and came under fire from the fans.

> He ended the 2014-15 season with the team on the threat of relegation, with a Thai sex tape scandal that led to three of the players (including the manager’s son), and then the manager, leaving the team.

> He started this season with a new manager, Claudio Ranieri, who had been out of work for eight months after being fired from Greece after only four months on the job.

Then what happened in the last year?

Jamie breaks the Guinness World Record with 11 goals in 11 games and becomes the first player at Leicester to score 20+ goals since Gary Lineker in 1984.

He helps lead Leicester City from 5000-1 underdogs to winning the Premier League this week in what has been called the “most unlikely triumph in the history of team sport".

Gary Lineker has said of his hometown team’s victory that it is "the biggest sporting shock of my lifetime. I can't think of anything that surpasses it in sporting history. It is difficult to put over in words.. It was hard to breathe. I was a season ticket holder from the age of seven. This is actually impossible.”

Alan Shearer has said "For a team like Leicester to come and take the giants on with their wealth and experience - not only take them on but to beat them - I think it's the biggest thing to happen in football.”

This week Jamie has also been named the Football Writers’ Player of the Year.

The inspiration in the story?

Never give up. Anything can happen. And sometimes it does.

“Anything can happen. If the underdog wants a game bad enough, they can go out and get it. We just need to keep on playing as hard as we can.” ~ Ashley Langen

Big congratulations to Jamie Vardy and Leicester City!

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight. It’s the size of the fight in the dog.” ~ Mark Twain

Top 10 Startup Mistakes

Four things make up 79% of all business failures:

#1 - Building something nobody wants (36%)
#2 - Hiring poorly (18%)
#3 - Lack of focus (13%)
#4 - Failing to market & sell (12%)

How to best avoid these failures:

#1 - Always start with the customer, not the product. Get your beta group / user group of customers and work with them to deliver what they love. People will pay you to do what they love, not to just do what you love.

#2 - Outsource to experts who manage themselves, not workers who need to be managed. Hire people who let you do more of what you do best, not people who take you away from your talents because they need to be managed.

#3 - Once opportunities begin to grow, don't get defocused. Anything that doesn't add to your customer's experience isn't worth doing.

#4 - Don't fail by having a great product that no one knows about. Don't rely on someone else to sell your product until you have more sales than you can handle. Don't make sales by closing customers. Create buyers by opening relationships.

#5 - More than all of the above, maximise failures that steer you (testing and measuring) and avoid failures that sink you (when you run out of money and time). Fail passionately and fail often, earning and learning with each failure, so it's you that keeps failing (and learning) and not your company!

"The biggest risk is not taking any risk.. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks."
~ Mark Zuckerberg

And...

"Never, never, never give up."~ Winston Churchill

What’s the price when you fail?

What’s the price when you fail?

This week, Elon Musk watched as his latest attempt at landing his Space X Falcon 9 rocket went wrong, ice froze one of the legs and the entire rocket toppled over and exploded.

That’s another $60 million up in smoke. What was Elon’s reaction?

First, he tweeted “Well, at least the pieces were bigger this time!”

Then, he posted a video of the explosion on Instagram.

And finally, he posted yesterday “My best guess for 2016: ~ 70% landing success rate (so still a few more RUDs to go), then hopefully improving to ~90% in 2017.”

“RUD” stands for “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly” which is another way of saying “it blew up”…

What can we learn from Elon happily blowing up his rockets?

Most people would see this as an expensive failure, but Elon is a master of learning by failing, and he expects to fail epically and often.

It doesn’t cost Elon to fail as he builds it into his business model. Each Falcon rocket is expected to be lost anyway if he wasn’t testing how to land them. This one had already done its job of delivering an ocean monitoring satellite in orbit, which had already paid for the rocket.

This year, there are another 10 to 20 falcon rockets scheduled for take-off, each already paid for by the companies and governments paying Elon to send their cargos to space. With revenue secure, he focuses his time on how to test new innovations (like landing the rockets back safely).

We’ve moved from the industrial age where product development and testing took place BEFORE delivery, to the technological age where product development and testing takes place DURING delivery.

How can you increase the testing you can do? When in front of customers? When serving your customers? When delivering an existing product to develop the next product?

In the old paradigm, it was easy to dismiss testing as being too costly.
In the new paradigm, it’s NOT testing that’s far more expensive.

When Elon finally works out how to return his rockets each time, he’ll be saving himself over a billion dollars of lost rockets each year - and he’ll be able to cost his trips to be far ahead of the competition.

You don’t need to be a billionaire like Elon to test like him.
But you do need to test like Elon to be a billionaire like him.

Failing isn’t where the price is. Failing is where the profit is.

“If things aren’t failing, you are not innovating enough.” ~ Elon Musk

If you’re up against adversity or overcoming challenges, this story is for you.

If you’re up against adversity or overcoming challenges, this story is for you.

Will Smith's first career as a rapper led to him going broke in 1990 when the IRS came knocking. Will says, “They wanted $2.8 million and I had two dollars and eighty three cents.”

“There’s nothing more sobering than having six cars and a mansion one day and you can’t even buy gas… the next.”

Overnight, his hip hop friends disappeared and he was left trying to figure out what to do next. Early success and fast spending had led to big failure.

It was producer Quincy Jones who became Will’s white knight. Quincy was planning a new comedy for NBC, and thought of his own experience bringing up his kids in Bel-Air. He remembered one call from his daughter who was away at camp: “Dad, the water here sucks. Please FedEx Evian.”

So Quincy put his experience together with Will Smith’s “Fresh Prince” image, and created “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”. Will auditioned while struggling with no money, and took the job. The series became a hit, but Will had to keep paying 70% of his pay to the IRS for the next 3 years.

Given a fresh start, with just enough to money to survive, Will threw himself into acting: "I was trying so hard," he said. "I would memorize the entire script, then I'd be lipping everybody's lines while they were talking… My performances were horrible.”

Will persevered, and set himself the goal of being "the biggest movie star in the world”. He threw himself into studying other movie stars and what they did. Then he picked the right movies:

“The biggest movie stars make the biggest movies, so I looked at the top 10 movies of all time. At that point, they were all special-effects movies. So Independence Day, no-brainer. Men in Black, no-brainer. I, Robot, no-brainer.”

His mix of failure, resilience, determination - and another 20 years of work-ethic - finally led him to his goal:

Will is the only actor to have eight consecutive films gross over $100 million in the domestic box office, eleven consecutive films gross over $150 million internationally, and eight consecutive films in which he starred open at the number one spot in the domestic box office tally.

He’s been ranked as the most bankable star worldwide by Forbes and set a Guiness World Record for attending three film premieres of films he featured in a 24 hour time period.

The path to success is never a straight path, and it’s the seeds we sow in our failures that create our success.

So cut out the noise on the outside, listen to the voice on the inside, and keep your eye on the prize.

All it takes is will.

Think Big - Dream Big - Earn Big

John Pemberton invented Coca-Cola when he was 55 years old.

Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s when he was 59 years old.

Colonel Sanders began franchising KFC at 62 years old.

Tim & Nina Zagat were 51 yr old lawyers when they wrote the 1st Zagat guide.

Charles Darwin was 50 years old before he wrote “On the Origin of Species”.

Julia Child was also 50 years olf when she wrote her first cookbook.

Henry Ford was 45 years old when he created the Model T car.

Microfinance pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, launched the Grameen Bank at 43 years old.

Samuel L. Jackson was 43 years old before he had his first hit film, “Jungle Fever”.

It’s never too late to succeed.
It’s always too early to quit.

“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
~ C.S. Lewis

How Instagram Invented ? - Story Behind It

18 months & 3 simple, not-so-simple steps to $1 billion...

Today, Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 billion. A week ago, when TIME asked Instagram founder, Kevin Systrom, if he would sell the company, he said “It’s not really on the top of our minds right now.”

Kevin is 27 years old and started Instagram 18 months ago with Mike Krieger, in October 2010. The company has grown with just 4 staff, and today has just 9 in the team. With the $1 billion deal that was announced today, was Kevin just plain lucky, or was there some simple steps that he (and others who have had the same luck) have in common?

Here’s three steps he followed. They may not guarantee you exactly the same success - but they will increase your own good fortune:

1. THINK BIG FROM DAY ONE - THEN LEARN FROM OTHERS:

It was while Kevin was studying at Stanford 7 years ago that he had the idea of a photo-sharing site, from his passion for photography. That was before iPhones, and before Facebook. Step one is to cultivate your idea by learning from others. He met Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 and talked about his idea. Mark then offered him a job at Facebook, which had just launched (in hindsight, a cheaper option that the $1 billion he’s just paid to work with Kevin). Kevin turned him down but they stayed in touch. He went to intern at Odeo with Evan Williams, who sold Blogger and Jack Dorsey, who launched Twitter. This is where Kevin got to understand the power of social sharing. Kevin later said “Comparing Instagram to photography is like comparing Twitter to Microsoft Word”.

He then went on to work at Google. All in all, it was a full six years after having the idea of a photo sharing site that he worked with others leading the field: Getting paid for his own education before he launched his own start-up. As Kevin says, “I was given the opportunity to be in the middle of a ton of innovation, and meet some of the smartest people doing the coolest stuff in the world. When I finally did it [myself], it just felt so right."

Who could you (and should you) be working with today to lay your own foundation?

2. KEEP 100% FOCUSED ON WHAT PROBLEM YOU’RE SOLVING - AND FAIL FIRST:

When Kevin launched Instagram in October 2010, he explained in his first blog what problems Instagram intended to solve. He listed the top three problems users were having:

“My mobile photos look lame.”
“It’s a pain to share to all my friends.”
“Photos take forever to upload.”

How would he know these were the problems? Just by talking to people? No, by getting it wrong the first time. In early 2010 he launched his first attempt “Burbn” as a location-based photo app, using Foursquare. It was a one-man-band, but after a year of hard work it had failed to catch on. It was, however, a failure that allowed him to learn from his users what would work, and to attract interest from like-minded people, including his future co-founder of Instagram, Mike Krieger.

By focusing on these three problems, Instagram launched in October 2010. Kevin relates the first moments of launch: “It was 12:15am, October 6th and we had been working on the app non-stop, day and night for 8 weeks. With a bit of hesitation, I clicked the button that launched “Instagram” live to the Apple app store. We figured we’d have at least 6 hours before anyone discovered the app so we could grab some shut-eye. No problem, we figured. Within a few minutes, they started pouring in... The night of sleep we were hoping for turned into a few meager hours before we rushed into the office to add capacity to the service. Now, only a couple months later, we’re happy to announce that our community consists of more than a million registered users.”

What problem are you solving, and what are you learning by failing, that is setting you up for your own overnight success?

3. CUT OUT ALL THE NOISE:

Kevin explains the difference between Instagram and Burbn: “We actually got an entire version of Burbn done as an iPhone app, but it felt cluttered, and overrun with features. It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram.”

Kevin cut out all the noise. He then launched Instagram just on the Apple App Store (It just came to Android last week) and focused on sharing on Twitter and Facebook (Three platforms that didn’t even exist when he first had the idea). That’s it: Photo, comment, like. No other platforms. No other noise.

Simpler means sharper means easier to cut through the noise. Instagram went from one million users by Dec 2010 to 30 million users today. In 2011, Apple named Instagram the “App of the Year”. Why would Facebook buy it now for $1 billion? Because Mark already knows it will add more value than that to Facebook when it has its upcoming $100 billion IPO.

If you are already thinking big, connecting smart and focused at the problems you are solving - How could you solve them in the fewest number of steps?

A BILLION DOLLAR STORY

It obviously takes more than three simple, not-so-simple steps to get the pieces lined up and timed right for the kind of 18 month run that Kevin has had. But these three show up again and again in today’s stories of hyper-growth, and the ones I will continue to share here on Facebook and at my Fast Forward events.

As an end to this chapter of the Instagram story, here’s how Kevin relates the beginning of his photo-sharing idea. It is at the heart of his journey, as your story should be at the heart of yours:

“When I studied abroad my teacher set what I do now in motion by saying, “Give me that camera of yours.” He took my camera away and gave me a little, plastic camera. I was studying in Florence at the time and he told me that I wasn’t allowed to use my camera for the rest of the class. I had to use this plastic camera with a terrible lens. He said I was too focused on sharpness and “I feel like you’re more artsy than that.””

“He said, “I want you to use this Holga,” this plastic camera with a plastic lens that had this cult following in the ’80s and ’90. I was blown away by what it could do to photos. My photography teacher was totally right. I was too focused on being meticulous with these really beautiful, complex architectural shots. It helps to see the world through a different lens and that’s what we wanted to do with Instagram. We wanted to give everyone the same feeling of discovering the world around you through a different lens.”

It’s ironic that as Instagram hits a $1 billion value, mimicking the feel of these disposable cameras, the biggest producer of them, Kodak, has filed for bankruptcy.

Each wave that crashes is followed by another. The only question is who is already positioning themselves to surf it. Are you up for the ride?

15 year old Canadian student, William Gadoury, hit the news for discovering an entire ancient Mayan City - by looking at the stars

Can you see order in chaos? Can you hear the signal in the noise?

Today 15 year old Canadian student, William Gadoury, hit the news for discovering an entire ancient Mayan City - by looking at the stars.

3 years ago, William got interested in Mayan cities when he learned about the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012. As he began learning he said “I didn’t understand why the Maya built their cities far away from rivers, in remote areas, or in the mountain.”

So he began studying the patterns of the cities, and then studied the patterns of 22 Mayan star constellations. He saw the links, and when he superimposed the constellations on a map of the Yucatan Peninsula on Google Earth, they linked perfectly with 117 ancient Mayan cities.

He also found the brightest stars linked to the largest cities.

Despite being only 15 years old, William is the first person to make the correlation.

William then looked at a 23rd constellation of three stars, and found only two cities. So he guessed there must be a city in the third spot.

What do you do if you think you’ve found a city? He contacted the Canadian Space Agency, who then got satellites from NASA and JAXA, the Japanese space agency.

Scientists were blown away when they found evidence of a previously un-discovered large, 86m high pyramid and thirty buildings exactly where William predicted.

Not only was it a new city, based on its size some experts predict that it could be one of the five largest.

As Canadian Space Agency’s Daniel de Lisle says, “Linking the positions of the stars to the location of a lost city along with the use of satellite images on a tiny territory to identify the remains buried under dense vegetation is quite exceptional.”

William’s discovery is now being published in a scientific journal and he will present his findings at Brazil’s International Science Fair next year.

Also, Mexican archaeologists have promised William he can join their expedition to the area to verify the find. William says “It would be the culmination of three years of work and the dream of a lifetime.”

If 15 year old William can discover an entire city, what could you find by looking more closely?

When I met Richard Branson on Necker Island last year, a friend asked him “Do you analyse data or use your gut when making decisions.” Richard replied, “It’s not really one or the other. I see patterns. If things fit, I do it.”

Science, exploration, art, music, sport - and entrepreneurship - all share a common theme: Patterns.

When, like William, you see the patterns, you can fill in the gap - Whether it’s your next step, a new innovation, or a new, ancient city.

“Learn how to see. Realize that everything is connected to everything else.” ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

Lose YourSelf And Win The Game

How Sara Blakely lost her way to a billion dollars: 8 years ago Sara lost in the finale of Richard Branson’s reality TV show “Rebel Billionaire”. The loss was one of many that turned Sara into the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire...

Sara’s entire life has been about failure. She says “My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn't have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don't be afraid to fail.”

In the 1990s Sara became an expert in failure by selling fax machines (remember those?) and was often so terrified of meeting prospects she would burst into tears and drive around the block to calm down before her sales calls.

Overheating from the stress of it, she decided to cut the feet off her pantyhose to cool down. That was her ‘aha’ moment. As she says “When I cut the feet out of my pantyhose that one time, I saw it as my sign.” She decided to start a business to sell the footless pantyhose in 1998 with just $5,000 - all of her savings - and called the company “Spanx”.

Did the failure stop then? No - “When I invented Spanx I heard 'no' for two years. It didn't faze me. I didn't have a special ability, it was sheer drive and telling myself to keep going.”

FAILING BIG

Working from her kitchen, she made a push for publicity, which simply means your failure becomes more public. For example, her experience with the English: “On the BBC, I was asked what Spanx could do for women in the U.K. I said, 'It smoothes and separates your fanny.' The interviewer looked mortified. I had no idea what was going on, so I kept rambling on about fannies until he stopped me and said, 'I think you mean bum.' The word fanny means vagina in England.”

Her publicity led her to Oprah and Richard Branson’s “Rebel Billionaire” in 2005. She ended up losing that too, but the show gave her a chance to realise what she really wanted to do with her future success - Start a charity for women. Branson gave her $750,000 to start her charity, the Sarah Blakely Foundation, to support women leaders.

What happens when your failure rate goes up? Your luck rate goes up too.

To face her failures, Sara had luck on her back - literally!

“I found my lucky red backpack from college in my mom's attic and became determined that it was going to change my path for Spanx because I kept hearing no, no, no. It went with me every step of the way, to the point of being made fun of because I went to Neiman Marcus headquarters with this old backpack as my presentation bag. Now, with the Sarah Blakely Foundation, every woman we send to college or help start a business receives a lucky red backpack. They're usually more excited about that than the money, which I totally get. The backpack is a symbol of their potential.”

THE BIGGEST RISK

This year Sara Blakely became the youngest female Billionaire in the world, with Spanx generating over $250 million in annual revenue. Sara puts this down to her sheer determination:

"The biggest risk in life is not risking. Every risk you take in life is in direct proportion to the reward. If I'm afraid of something, it's the next thing I have to go do. That's just the way I've been."

What are your big dreams? Where are your greatest risks?

Get your own lucky charm on your back, cut off the feet of whatever is holding you back, turn on the music and take the path that Sara took.

Today, 41 year-old Sara makes many speeches to inspire other entrepreneurs, and even the song she uses to get in her zone is the anthem to failure. As she says - “Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' is my go-to song to pump myself up if I'm having a tough time or if I get really nervous right before a speech.”

Now that she’s a billionare, her mission is “World Butt Domination” through Spanx and supporting women through her foundation, which has donated $17.5 million to charities supporting girls and women in South Africa.

Her failure has meant her wealth has come with humility, which is a different kind of wealth: “I feel like money makes you more of who you already are. If you’re an a**hole, you become a bigger a**hole. If you’re nice, you become nicer. Money is fun to make, fun to spend and fun to give away.”

Use Sara's story to inspire your day: Lose yourself and win the game.

Be Like An Ants , Never Give Up !

Here's Charles. A month ago he was set to close his business. This week, he sold it for $180 million. That's why he's smiling...

After six years trying to figure out how to make games on the iPhone, Charles Forman was about to give up, with his company, Omgpop, set to run out of money by this May. Things changes three days ago. He said in an interview with the New York Times on Monday “I had $1,700 in my bank account yesterday, and now I have a whole lot more.”

So what changed? After 35 attempts at making games that would be successful, the Omgpop team finally found a hit at the beginning of February. The game, called “Draw Something” is like Pictionary for the iPhone. Since it launched on Feb 6th, it has been downloaded 35 million times. It caught the attention of Zynga, the game company behind Farmville and other Facebook game hits. A month after the game launched, Zynga just bought Omgpop from Charles for $180 million.

Do you have the perseverance to try to create a success after 35 failures? Is it worth the six years of trying and failing to reach the runaway success? This is another example of hyper-growth that comes from getting your surf board back out there again and again.

This story unfolded while I was on my recent Australia tour, where I was sharing similar stories of 'overnight' successes. This hit the headlines this week. Next week will be another story, and then another. Surf’s up! Will it be your turn next?

None Of These Companies Existed 20 Years Ago

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles.

Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider owns no real estate.

Facebook, the world’s most popular media provider creates no content.

Instagram, the most valuable photo company, sells no cameras.

Netflix, the fastest growing television network, lays no cables.

Alibaba, the world’s most valuable retailer has no inventory.

All six are building customer networks and scalable software - not factory networks and clunky hardware. All six focus at personalized customer experiences not mass production. All six attract more new customers from word-of-mouth than expensive marketing. All six have disrupted their industry at a global scale.

None of these six companies existed 20 years ago.

How can you rethink your own business model - and industry - today?

Richard Branson’s Top 12 Tips for Entrepreneurs:

Richard Branson’s Top 12 Tips for Entrepreneurs:

This week, Richard is selling Virgin America to Alaska Airlines in a $2 billion deal - less than 10 years after he launched the airline. Even after selling it, he will still keep getting income by licensing the Virgin brand to the company.

This is yet another billion dollar deal that Richard’s Virgin Group has achieved while he spends eight months of the year on his Necker Island, where I’ve spent a few weeks with him over the last few years (here dressed as Pirates on his super-yacht, the Necker Belle).

What does it take to think more like Richard? Here’s my list of his Top 12 Tips that I’ve used - and recommend you use - to be a smarter entrepreneur:

Tip #1 - Listen more than you talk. Nobody learned anything by hearing themselves speak.

Tip #2 - Three steps to success: Hire great talent, give them the tools to succeed, and get out of the way.

Tip #3 - Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to.

Tip #4 - It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside. The brave may not live forever – But the cautious do not live at all.

Tip #5 - Have courage. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Tip #6 - I never get the accountants in before I start up a business. It's done on gut feeling, especially if I can see that they are taking the mickey out of the consumer.

Tip #7 - You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over. One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

Tip #8 - There is no greater thing you can do with your life and your work than follow your passions – in a way that serves the world and you. As soon as something stops being fun, I think it’s time to move on. Life is too short to be unhappy.

Tip #9 - Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I've done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin's success.

Tip #10 - If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!

Tip #11 - I have always believed that the only way to cope with a cash crisis is not to contract but to try to expand out of it.

Tip #12 - For a successful entrepreneur it can mean extreme wealth. But with extreme wealth comes extreme responsibility. And the responsibility for me is to invest in creating new businesses, create jobs, employ people, and to put money aside to tackle issues where we can make a difference.

Which one or more of these could you start practicing today?

And to end, I’ll add my own tip to this list - take the time each year to connect with the role models who inspire you and, in the words of Richard, “Listen. It makes you sound smarter.”

 

Winners never quit and quitters never win

In my 20's I would ask mentors what they thought the most important key to success was. They all had different opinions. Then one gave me the very best answer. He said "All the most successful people have many differences, but they only have one thing in common. They never gave up. The ones who gave up you don't see. You only see the ones who never gave up. So as long as you never give up, no matter what, you'll be fine."

"Winners never quit and quitters never win." - Vince Lombardi

One Step To History - By Winston Churchill

What one small step you take today could lead to a multi-million dollar chain reaction? That’s what happened to Susan Wojcicki when she was 30 years old: “I had just got out of business school and bought a house. So I needed to get some renters in order to help pay the mortgage...”

So she rented our her garage to two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who used it to start up their new company, Google.

Susan remembers the first year, with many “late nights together in the garage eating pizza and M&Ms, where (Larry and Sergey) talked to me about how their technology could change the world."

They finally convinced her to join as Employee No.18 and their first marketing manager, when she was four months pregnant. First job? Relocate them all to a proper office.

Called the “Mom at Google”, Susan was the first in the team to have a baby, and her “family first” philosophy led to Google topping the ‘Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For’ list.

The “family” grew, literally, with Sergey Brin marrying Susan’s sister, Anne, and having two kids. Susan herself had five kids. All while growing the marketing side of Google.

In charge of products, it was Susan who came up with the idea of Adsense, which grew to become 97% of Google’s revenue within the next 10 years. That earned Susan the nickname “The Money.”

She then focused at video, only to find a new start-up, Youtube, was growing much faster than Google video.

While working out what to do to compete, Susan stumbled on a Youtube video of two boys in China lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys. She recalls “That was the video that made me realize that 'Wow, people all over the world can create content, and they don’t need to be in a studio.”

Instead of trying to compete, Susan convinced Larry and Sergey to buy Youtube, and six months later Google bought Youtube for $1.65 billion.

In February 2014, Susan became the CEO of Youtube, and today she is worth $300 million.

What began with a simple decision to rent out her garage has led Susan on a journey that has included being named No.1 on the Adweek 50 list in 2013, being called “The most important person in advertising” and “The most powerful woman on the Internet” by TIME in 2015.

And for Susan, the journey is still just beginning. As she says, “Google is fascinating, and the book isn't finished. I'm creating, living, building, and writing those chapters.”

Now it’s your turn. If Susan can do it (while raising five kids) you can too.

Take a step forward today.

Any step.

There’s no guarantee it will lead to the same magical journey that Susan has been on.

But there’s no guarantee it won’t, either.