Category: Team Building

Successful entrepreneurs are often seen as impulsive gamblers. Neil Blumenthal says he used a different strategy to grow billion-dollar eyewear brand Warby Parker: minimizing risk.

According to Blumenthal, building your  business strategy around risk minimization can save money and help your company scale to meet demand. Warby Parker‘s first retail store was a showroom built into its New York City-based office–followed by pop-up stores and, eventually, a brick-and-mortar storefront. Each experience allowed Blumenthal’s team to learn what parts of the shopping experience did and didn’t work for consumers.

“We didn’t come in with any assumptions on what the right thing to do was,” says Blumenthal. “It was ‘Let’s learn, get better, and evolve.'” 

The key to minimizing risk is threefold: Be flexible, take small steps, and make informed decisions. That’s one of the biggest takeaways from this week’s episode of Inc.‘s What I Know podcast, featuring Blumenthal. 

We all have privileges. 

If you are reading this now, you are privileged in many ways. Some of these advantages you have been born with, while others you fought to receive. Some, as we are reminded by today’s “Strike for Black Lives,” have been won through collective action. 

While I am a minority, I understand I have privileges that Black people don’t. In 1965, an Immigration Act was passed that enabled Indian Americans, especially those with specialized professional skills, to enter into this country. If you were proficient, smart, and skilled, America welcomed you–a starkly different invitation compared to how Black slaves were brought into the country.

Yet, when 9/11 occurred, I sat in my middle school classroom suddenly wanting more than anything to be White. While we watched the news blaring from the TV, I didn’t want any of my classmates to turn around and see

One of the characteristics that every good investor looks for in an aspiring entrepreneur is resilience, or the ability to learn from and bounce back after a failure.

You don’t have to have previous startup problems to show resilience – everyone should have a story of tackling a tough challenge with minimal success, but using the failure to move on and achieve an objective.

With startups, almost every entrepreneur I know has failed at least once, often several times, but never gave up, and ultimately achieved their goal. Evan Williams, for example, before co-founding Twitter, started a podcasting platform named Odeo. The platform couldn’t compete with Apple’s podcast section of iTunes, so he recast his efforts into microblogging, and the rest is history.

The challenge is how you can enhance your own ability to bounce back, and highlight that attribute to your team and outside constituents, including investors