Allan Vermeulen on Work and Career
“What do you do when you fail? You keep trying if you know your idea is right!”
On the topic of work and career, Allan discussed his path as an entrepreneur from a small start up to Amazon.com, working his way through being an entrepreneur, his successes and failures in business, taking and giving advice, working with other people, and of course his views on what it fundamentally means to be an entrepreneur.
Watch Allan talk about Amazon’s experience with failure before reaching success:
Allan talked about the importance of finding ways to distinguish oneself:
“The problem is when you are hiring people, you need some way to differentiate them. We are looking for something to make them stand out. Yes, it does matter what school you went to and it does matter what your grades look like, but the real general answer, is that it matters that you have something to differentiate yourself from other folks.”
On going from a small start up to a company like Amazon.com:
“One of the things I learned going from Rouge Wave to Amazon.com is patience and the value of thinking long term.”
On advice:
“My experience is to try and gather advice from as many people as possible. And most advice is sound in its particular context. And you have to see if that advice applies to who you are… I don’t know if any advice is particularly terrible, but it doesn’t always apply to who you are.”
And finally, Allan on entrepreneurship and the fact that it is not enough to have an idea, but that you have to act on it and do something with your idea:
“To me, an entrepreneur is someone who takes an idea and then figures out how to do whatever needs to be done to take that idea and turn it into a real thing that customers are using. To me that is what an entrepreneur does. You have an idea, you want to turn it into something that makes customers happy, you do whatever the steps are in between to make that happen.”