Top tips for budding entrepreneurs – Campus Party 2013

As you’d expect, Campus Party has been full of entrepreneurs sharing their successes and the lessons they’ve learnt along the way.  So, what does it take to be an entrepreneur? We caught up with all the great minds to find out what top tips are available for any budding entrepreneur…

Be willing to take risks

David Rowan (Editor of Wired UK) spoke about the posters that are famously used in the Facebook offices, encouraging risk takers:

• ‘Take a Risk’
• ‘Move fast and break things’
• ‘Done is better than Perfect’

Don’t be afraid to fail

Failure is a critical part of the process and it’s often where you learn the most. Will Jackson from RoboThespian shared their motto for failure: “Fail Fast, Fail Often.” During David Rowan’s presentation he shared stories of entrepreneurs who have failed, but have gone on to have success with their other projects:

• Jimmy Wales created NuPedia before Wikipedia but it was only open to a select few, meaning that it didn’t work as well. Wikipedia took off out of its shadow when Jimmy allowed the crowd to edit
• Michael Acton Smith had success with Shot Glass Chess sets before embarking on the ambitious Perplex City that was too niche to succeed.  He rolled the dice on his final £1m and came up with Moshi Monsters
• Rovio put out 50 games that didn’t do well before they released Angry Birds which went on to do… alright.

Follow your dreams

Nick Thain (CEO of New Sports Media) said “If you don’t have a dream there is no way to make one come true”

Nick also shared the quote that inspires him most: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” – Wayne Gretzky

How can we help entrepreneurs?

David Rowan was clear that for entrepreneurs to succeed, we need to create the right environment for them to work and meet other like-minded people:

“There needs to be events like Campus Party where ideas can be shared with liked minded people and ideas created in late night brainstorming sessions.  A conversation over a laptop could become a company that then becomes an acquired company.”