Damir Perge's Blog: Entrepreneur Insights from the Trenches, page 4

Startup Unicorns: How to Build a Billion Dollar Startup Almost Overnight

As an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and complexity scientist, I have been trying to determine what factors enable some startups to become billion dollar startups almost overnight. I have written more than 220 articles on startups and entrepreneurship over the last eight months. But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million words, so we decided to put my ideas into a video series.

First of all, I say almost overnight because building a billion dollar startup go...

The Changing, Modification and Amplification of the Future

In a message to his partners, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said, “It’s been said that the ‘the best way to create the future is to invent it,’ which is why we [Starbucks] must continue to push for innovations that reflect and support our core values.”

Being a complexity scientist, Shultz’s “inventing the future” quote triggered me to think hard about various ways of looking at the future. The future is unpredictable. Like any natural ecosystem—or a marketplace created by humans, such as Wall S...

Entreprenetics: The Sexiness of ‘Effortlessness’

Sometimes when you try too hard, really hard, it gets you nowhere. Of course, I’ve been on the opposite side of the effort spectrum, where trying hard, really hard, gets you anywhere you want. Sometimes trying hard is a must, sometimes you get no results—and worst of all, it can yield mediocre results. I learned this entrepreneur principle from my uncle, Michael Radojevich. He made entrepreneurship look effortless.

Getting no results is better than mediocre results because when something is no...

Efficionado: Speeding Your Business into the Stractical Zone

When I was younger, quickness and speed were important in my soccer game. Speed was not my forte but quickness more then compensated. I used quickness and technical skill to get around defenders. I was not the fastest athlete in a 100-yard sprint, nor even a 40-yard sprint, but the first 5, 10, 15 or even 30 yards—I owned those yards. Applying quickness and speed to your business is a game changer.

The cheetah, my favorite animal, displays both quickness and speed. But although a cheetah can g...

The Shock of Disruptive Innovation: The Un-LinkedIn Way to Think About Injecting Innovation

Injecting a disruptive breakthrough, an “idea shock,” into any innovation is proportional to the internal or external boundaries of the system defined. When you completely rely on domain experts, who have developed extensive knowledge of the components residing inside the box, the tendency to inject a shocking new idea that could become a game changer decreases substantially.

Any new way of looking at the solution to any problem usually comes from the external environment or “outside of the bo...

Startup Prophecy: The Art of Re-learning

To put it bluntly — some of the old business theories hit it right on the money. Others are way off. But if you look closely at the predictions from the old books, that are today evolving in the right direction, you can find answers to help see the evolution of the future.

Sometimes it's good to go back to the whiteboard to figure out whether what you learned before as an entrepreneur is applicable today and tomorrow. What you learned previously is a combination of education based on experienc...

Entreprenetics: Reinvent Your Mind

What you know today or yesterday doesn’t matter. It's what you'll know tomorrow that will determine your success or failure.

Global connectivity is increasing exponentially. So you must compete globally– not just domestically. Reinventing the mind is critical to effectively compete in the marketplace. Your education of yesterday doesn’t work today. Education is not enough. Continuous innovation of your mind is vital.

Silicon Valley is known for its continuous reinvention of the collective mind....

The One Thousand Small and Big Decisions

Business, like life, is about making decisions. If you look over your life from both personal and professional perspective, your inflection points of success are easily recognized. Most successful people do not give enough credit to the combination of small and big decisions made along the way that got them to the top.

Reflection, as a learning tool, can be misleading. When you reflect on “how you made it big” it's easy to remember the big decisions. But your decision process, just like life i...

Entreprenetics: The Trigger Effect of Simple Words

The recombination and/or addition of words has created trillion dollar industries. And the game of triggering new ideas through indirect and direct methods will go on forever—until humanity continues to exist.

The psychology of the inspiring entrepreneur mind requires and wants to continually innovate. Open your mind to the external stimuli of all your senses, and everything and anything will become a trigger point helping you to come up with something new and revolutionary. Images and sounds...

Entreprenetics: Trust Your Instinct

In soccer I was an instinctive player. I trusted my instinct to dribble around players—and if you asked me how I did it after the game, I couldn’t tell you. There were times where I wouldn’t even recall what I did or how I did it. When you rely on your instincts in sports or business, magic happens. Great innovators throughout history used their instincts to generate disruptive ideas. Henry Ford was one of them but he wasn’t alone.

Instincts enable you to develop super hits—the kinds of super...