Brian Shuster is one of the pioneers of the internet, and has developed and holds the patents to many core internet technologies and business methods. He is considered one of the trail-blazers in internet content provision, and has been discussed and featured in many industry and general news outlets, including: MSNBC.com, Business 2.0, Yahoo, Wired News, and many others.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
None
When business started difficulties overcame:
“There is obviously lots of challenges one is going about starting a business. On substantial one is this sort of fear of disengaging from a more traditional path… I got in to the business of developing print materials for UCLA instructors. And so that sort helped me overcome that challenge. It sucked out all of my available free time that would have been recreation and non-productive. But by sacrificing that I was able to prove to myself that I could create a business that could generate profit and I had years to do that. By the time I was done with college I was successful in that space. So I could rely on that therefore to not got to medical school. So I would say that was certainly probably the biggest challenge was to say, how am I going to live, how am I going to deal with not having a fall back in the event that the business that I am trying to get off the ground…because getting a business off the ground is hard – most businesses fail. And most of them fail I think because you have too short a runway. If you can give yourself an unlimited runway then you are making the call of when the business is failed”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
The Art of War Book by Sun Tzu
Favourite Quote:
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” – John F. Kennedy
Recommended Online Resources:
Also mentioned:
The Curio Browser
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“Never be married to the path. The temptation to say this is the way I will be successful, this is the way I will have the business start I think leads to more failure than anything else. If you know that you are trying to arrive at a destination and you even have some flexibility on the destination”…[Listen for More]
More About Brian Shuster:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Maybe we should always start everything from the inside and work to the outside, and not from the outside to the inside. What d’you think?” Aidan Chambers
Other Quotes From the Chat with Brian Shuster:
- “I am able to encounter problems before other people and I am able to solve those problems”
- “my favourite things is really the reflection and figuring out the path forward, figuring out what are the hindrances to that path”
- “those epiphany moments get me high. You have an epiphany, you realise here is a problem and here is why the industry is in where it is and where it is log jammed and here is how we can break through it, and all we have to do is go to this path, make these developments. Have those realisations is really spectacular – its highly motivating”
- “virtual reality is going to touch so many people in so many ways”
- “saying failure isn’t an option, I think that is poor advice. I think the good advice is to say well many failures aren’t necessary. What you don’t want to do is commit everything all at once and then have a major failure which disrupts your business to the point where it fails. And you want to go in with the understanding that you will find things that don’t work that you never thought were going to be an issue. And learn to overcome those before they can actually derail your plan”
- “if you don’t have chemistry with your employees it is the same as any other relationship where you don’t have chemistry, it is going to be difficult to get them to understand your vision, it is going to be difficult to understand how exactly how they are approaching things”
- “the problems only really become obvious after you have gone to market”
- “you don’t over commit your resources until you know that something is going to work. And you only know something is going to work when it works”
- “you need not be married to the path you just need to be married to where you are going”
- “you require two facets of luck, not to have bad luck, and the other facet of course is to have some good luck”
- “we can see that the technology to deliver Matrix like experience to people is inevitable. Because it is inevitable what are the first steps, what are the second steps. How do we get from where we are now to this fully actualised virtual reality experience?”
- “over the next couple of years the entire landscape of business and commerce and everything else…education, government…it will all change. And what that means is virtual reality is a pasture on which there is enormous amount of real estate that can be staked out”
- “the space that is east to become successful, the space that is absolutely make new billionaires rapidly over the next couple of years is virtual reality.”
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