I agree with both Salik and Peter's comments about luck being a very important role in career success. My favorite line from Jeff's talk was "Success is putting yourself in the way of opportunity until you get lucky." As a member of a professional business fraternity, I have too often heard that it's not what you know, but who you know, and I feel this aligns with Jeff's statement very closely. To have the opportunity to meet certain people in the industry of interest is, really, luck at times, and due to the nature of the Silicon Valley and its high potential startups to be very selective with its talent, sometimes that can be the make or break of getting the right foot in the door to jumpstart one's career success. I also agree with Peter that Jeff's emphasis on staying grounded and not letting your ego get in the way of your work (in title or task) is really good advice. "Smart is your ante, luck runs your register."

I think Jeff was being very modest during the presentation.  While he was lucky to find Shutterfly or Shutterfly to find him, he still needed to have the skills, leadership and vision to guild the company to success.  I think as prospective entreprenuers, we should actively prepare ourselves to take advantage of "lucky" opportunities that come our way as opposed to trying to get lucky again.

I liked Mr. Household's perspective on entrepreneurship. When I talk to people about it, they usually see it as starting a new business using VC money. I think the state of mind of entrepreneurship is more important than actually starting a business (we can start many things not just businesses). It is more of always having an open mind to trying new things to create revolution or evolution to whatever we are doing (no matter if it is a big or small company, or our own life). For example, Mr. Household created that global program at Accenture, even though he was in the consulting business not in entrepreneurship. Even, when he worked at eBay he was always trying to get new customers and suppliers for Ebay. That is like creating markets, which again is directly related to entrepreneurship. In short, I just liked his advice of not thinking of entreprenuership as just starting a new business.

Jeff's definition of entrepreneurship being a state of the mind was certainly an eye opener.  Its interesting how the different things he listed go into making a successful entrepreneur. Firstly, you certainly need to put yourself in the path many opportunities as possible and leave the rest to luck. Secondly, need to hire good people both technically and culturally(good fit, team player). Last but not the least, delegation is key to letting you and the people around you to grow and yet maintaining a balance in life and family.

Last edited by chandrasekhar.esakkimuthu (2008-04-16 13:56:45)

I agree with Sidney in that Jeff seemed impressively modest in attributing his success, in large part, to luck. Clearly it is impossible to consider all the variables that go into creating a working business plan, and on some level a throw of the dice does seem to be involved. But certain entrepreneurs seem to have an uncanny ability to sense an emerging market niche and to develop an effective way to fill it. Plus, if you look at all the entrepreneurs that have gotten "lucky" over the last decade, a encouraging amount have a strong academic background (like Jeff himself) and previous successes. It might be fair to say luck is involved, but there seem to be charms one can gather to increase the odds (experience, education, strong team, novel idea, etc).

I think that most successful entrepreneurs see the ways in which luck helped their success relatively quickly. A random introduction turns into a successful business alliance, your programmers pet project turns out to be really useful and then takes off and becomes the next big thing, etc. These, however, are all about setting up the right environment for such things to be possible - talking to new people all the time, giving your engineers the freedom to innovate, and having the resources and focus to turn this innovation into a real product. Successful entrepreneurs will have done all of this and will be able to really benefit from lucky breaks and also survive streaks of bad luck. You won't become the next Bill Gates without an incredible amount of chance, no matter how exceptional you are, but if you don't play every single card you are dealt in just the right way then no amount of luck will help you become successful.

Jeff gave a very good talk on how an entrepreneur build up his/her own business. He also made a very reasonal advice on which strategy he think it will sustain the business. Of course we might all agree that luck would decide whether a business would succeed, but a pratical business framework is also very crucial. For example, Jeff mentioned that he prefers to upgrading the existing function of shutterfly instead of spending time in developing new but useless function for the website.  This is one of his strategies which makes his business sustain. Although entreprenuers need to input a lot of new idea into the business everyday, they cannot forget the idea has to be practical for their business framework. It is because business is business, it might come from an idea but not purely just an idea.

I believe Jeff's best advice had to do with how to get things done around a company. Here at Stanford, we are used to doing everything ourselves and we like to be in control of every single aspect of a project or assignment we have. This is due to the fact that we are all very capable students and since we know we can do stuff right, we want to make sure we do it so that it turns out right. But Jeff's advice was to learn how to delegate. He said delegating is of great importance in order to successfully manage a company. And throughout my past quarters at Stanford, I have put this into practice and realized that it is essential to good team management. Trusting people to do tasks and giving them freedom as to how to do it makes a huge different in the long run.