Words of Wisdom from Naval Ravikant

by Scott Edward Walker on January 25th, 2015

To Our Clients & Friends: Welcome to our weekly series “Helping Entrepreneurs Succeed.”  Each week, we share a brief video of a successful entrepreneur, investor or business leader on a variety of topics.  This week, we again present Naval Ravikant, a very smart entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder of Venture Hacks and AngelList.

In this interesting clip from a few years back (courtesy of GigaOm), Naval shares some solid nuggets for entrepreneurs, including the following:

• “To be an entrepreneur, you essentially have to be passionate, almost irrationally optimistic [and] highly committed to the single thing that you’re focused on.” (at 0:58)
• “You have to basically break down doors and pull trains and do whatever it takes to get people to follow you and your vision.” (at 1:07)
• “It’s the people, stupid.” (at 2:27)
• “You should find a great partner no matter what it is you are doing; and you should look for someone who has very high intelligence, very high energy and very high integrity.” (at 2:53)
• “Integrity is something that takes a lot of time spent with someone to figure out.” (at 3:16)
• “When an entrepreneur shows you their product, you’re not evaluating the product so much as you’re evaluating it as a resume for the person.” (at 5:12)
• “You can always recognize the first-time [entrepreneurs] because they are too secretive; and you can always recognize the experienced ones because they don’t care.” (at 6:40)
• “Most companies fail…because of interpersonal conflicts, either between the founders or between the founder and investor.” (at 7:18)

I hope you enjoy it.  Cheers, Scott