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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
In 1998 and 1999 you could raise $60 million for an Internet idea without a business plan with a single phone call. It was a very different era, but back in 1995 it was very difficult to raise money. And, by the way, it wasn't more difficult than it had been for the previous 20 years to raise money, it just was sort of normally hard. It's supposed to be hard to raise a million dollars. So, with a lot of hard work we raised that million dollars from about 20 different angel investors who invested about $50,000 each, and that was the original money that really funded Amazon.com.
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Jeff Bezos
Founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way -- it's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic -- and so if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. It's sort of like, I don't have any doubt about whether we're going to fail. That's the likely outcome. It just is, and to pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. So, what you do with those early investment dollars -- if you have $300,000 and then you have a million dollars -- what you do with those early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So, you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are, and you try to eliminate them one at a time. That's how small companies get a little bit bigger, and then a little bit bigger, and a little bit bigger, until finally, at a certain stage, you reach a transition where the company has more control over its future destiny.
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Benazir Bhutto
Former Prime Minister of Pakistan
Benazir Bhutto: In life there are challenges, but I think leadership is very much predicated on the capacity to absorb defeat and overcome it. Now, after having been in politics for more than two decades, I have come to the strong conclusion that the difference between somebody who succeeds and somebody who fails is the ability to absorb a setback. Because on the road to success there will be setbacks, and there are those who give up, and those who say that, "No, we are going to go on." So it's that capacity to absorb a failure.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
We went across the street to the apartment of somebody who had a TV -- not everybody had a TV -- so we could watch this (the moon landing). We had this great -- we watched this, you know, amazing thing. We all came back, and then I was doing my little biochemical analyses and nothing had fallen into place, and I lost a whole lot of the sample, and I thought, "This is not a good day for my science." But then very soon after -- the same samples -- I had analyzed them, and I suddenly thought about them in a different way, and suddenly everything fell into place. And ah, yes! Now I understood what was going on. So I remember that very well, because there was a sort of juxtaposition of the moon's triumph, my technical failure, and then, very quickly after, somehow things just kind of fell into place. You know, it was a very trivial problem now, but at the time, that process of going through it was something that I suddenly realized, the addiction to science. That "Ah!" You've suddenly seen a way through. You've seen how something is. You've understood how something works.
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Elizabeth Blackburn
Nobel Prize in Medicine
The other side of what we do is we are very interested in how this does relate to cancer cells. So while we do experiments in simpler organisms, where we can get fast answers and they are complicated enough as they are, we also are trying to apply certain of these questions directly into human cancer cells and say, "What can we learn there, because there may be directions that could be, eventually, down the line perhaps, therapeutically useful. It would be wonderful to see. So maybe all this medical background is starting to sort of sneak out again, and everybody probably dreams that their research might do some concrete good, but you also know it's a long road, because drugs and therapeutics don't just fall into your lap. They're tough. Humans are complex, and things that work in cells, things that work in molecules really well, it's very complicated how it plays out in the whole human body. So you know, we can have great hopes, but we also know that things may never work out in quite the same way that we planned. But I have a hunch that they'll work out in some way. I'm just not exactly sure how it would play out
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