August 21, 2013, 7:50 p.m. ET
Inventing With an Eye on the Future
Even with an exceptional idea, budding entrepreneurs can struggle to move past the brainstorming stages. They face challenges in execution like building a cohesive team, coming up with a business plan and even understanding how to present their product or service. This week mentors on “WSJ Startup of the Year,” a documentary on wsj.com, offered some words of inspiration for all entrepreneurs. Here’s what some science and technology innovators had to say. Edited excerpts:
Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google Inc. GOOG +0.45% : “Ninety-five percent of the innovators I meet would actually do exactly what they say if given the resources, but most of those projects would fail because the timing is wrong. A lot of business and technology plans assume the world three or four years from now will be kind of like it is today, and that’s not the world you need to aim at. That’s going to be a completely different world. The world is completely changed in just a few years time, and it will change at an even faster pace in the future. So a key harbinger of success is to actually understand this exponential pace of change and make your project relevant for the future world and meet the train when you get there.”
Peter Diamandis, chairman and founder of XPRIZE Foundation: “What I’m interested in seeing is someone who’s passionate about what they’re doing; that they love it; that they’re excited about it. Because a business plan isn’t worth much of anything. What really is worth something is a set of entrepreneurs whose mission this is to make happen beyond anything. That at 3 o’clock in the morning when they hit another brick wall, they’re going to wake up and take a different direction. Ultimately a business plan is going to be out-of-date as soon as you begin writing it. And it is really that internal dimension of passion, of commitment that will carry through all the hurdles along the way.”
Bob Hariri, founder and CEO of Celgene Cellular Therapeutics: “It’s the mission and the man. You establish a clear mission, what you want to do and then you go and find really great people. You have to have the kind of outgoing, engaging personalities that let [you] pull the best and the brightest. You’ve got to be evangelical about your mission. And then when you get them to sign on and you can inject some of that passion in them, then you can build a remarkably successful business.”
Dean Kamen, Segway inventor and health-care innovator: “If you believe that what drives a person to be an entrepreneur is money or not wanting to risk money, I’d say that’s an early sign that this is not an entrepreneur. Every entrepreneur I’ve ever seen is driven by the passion to do something, believing that if it’s as good as they think it is, of course somebody will make money. And probably if they stay with it, they’ll make some of it, maybe most of it or maybe all of it. But I doubt any great entrepreneur in history got up in the morning and said I think I’ve got a good plan on how to make money. I think Wilbur and Orville [Wright] wanted to fly, I think [Thomas] Edison wanted to make light without candles.”
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