Always interesting to hear how others have made their way into entrepreneurship and continue to reinvent themselves:
When did your experience with entrepreneurism start?
During college I worked on a commercial fishing boat off the New Hampshire coast. I took a year off to start a fishing company called Same Day Fish Company. We sold fish to supermarkets in northern New England. The innovation was that we’d always deliver fish within 24 hours. It was completely fresh and the restaurants could keep the fish for longer. It was a great business, but it was a brutal business. To get the fish to them within 24 hours basically meant working 24 hours a day.After that, I worked at Time Inc. for Fortune magazine, and basically came up with ideas for new magazines. From there, I moved to U.S. News & World Report, where I kept coming up with new ideas.
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How do you know if your idea is any good?
The real test for me is if the idea builds momentum the more time you spend with it. I’m a big believer that you have to spend a lot of time with an idea. Good ideas get stronger the more you work on them. You begin to lose interest in weak ideas.I’ve also gotten to the point where I view that ideas are relatively cheap. Having an idea alone is not what makes a successful company. You need to have a great idea, great timing, and the most important piece: sufficient capital. The idea will need multiple iterations, and that takes time and money.
