Find Your Own Path

You've worked in corporations, one of your early jobs was at Clorox managing the company brand and you're an entrepreneur. How would you advise a young leader today with entrepreneurial ambitions in planning his or her career? Should they start at an established company first to get some work experience or go ahead and bypass that and launch that startup?

Well, my work at Clorox was invaluable to me. I mean, it was such a great learning place for me as a person and made me a better business person. So for me, I would say I needed that grounding. And I'm really, to this day, I'm good friends with some of the people I met at Clorox all those years ago. But I think everyone needs to look at themselves, where they are and what they think they need to learn. I'm a little more conservative. I came to be an entrepreneur late in life. I felt like I needed to learn what a salesperson does, what a product manager does, what the CFO does, what engineers do. And I spent time really working closely with each group before I actually started my own business. I spent a lot of time understanding how products get built and how they get to market and where my strengths are. But that's me. And I would say I'm more conservative. And I would say that if you look around you, there's no one path. The only thing I would say is if you don't take that first step, you'll never know. You'll never know what's right for you. It certainly is easier to fail when you're younger than when you're older, but failure is always part of the process. It's easier to take a financial risk when you're young versus older. When you're older, you've got a lot more at stake when you start taking the risk. But if you don't take those, if you don't take that step, you'll never know. And no one, I can't prescribe that. I think the more you know yourself, the more you know what's right for you. Because, look, there have been great entrepreneurs... Look at Bill Gates. Look at Steve Jobs. I mean, these guys like they have to start companies. They had burning passion. And how old were they? 20, 21. They were babies.

Look at Elon Musk, he's starting things all the time. He never stops!

He never stops. So, you know, these guys were brilliant. Now they may be the exception. I mean, I wouldn't say everyone drop out of college and start a business, I'm Peter Thiel, which is, "You don't need college." You probably need college, college is more than what you learn in the books anyway. But I would say there's no right answer. I would say if you believe you want to be an entrepreneur and if you're jealous of entrepreneurs, which I used to get really jealous of them, then that means you should be doing it. Just do it.