14 lessons from Entrepreneurs on Starting Your Business
Article

14 lessons from Entrepreneurs on Starting Your Business

Saemoon Yoon
World Economic Forum, 2021

Read, Listen, or Discuss

 Discuss
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

8

getAbstract Rating

  • Overview
  • Concrete Examples
  • For Beginners

Recommendation

Almost everyone in business flirts with the idea of founding a company, pursuing his or her dream and succeeding. In this World Economic Forum article by Saemoon Yoon, 14 entrepreneurs who successfully overcame the steep odds facing new businesses share their insights. They discuss how they discovered their opportunity and what important lessons they learned from their experience.

Summary

Start-up companies are critical to the world economy.

Fourteen participants in the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers community came together to share their insights about successful entrepreneurship.  

Andreas Konig, CEO and co-founder of Proglove, explains that his company developed an integrated bar code scanner and glove after learning that BMW factory workers perform a million scans a day. Sparing them having to pick up and put down the scanner each time saves four seconds per scan. Because a second is worth about a dollar in this setting, that translates to an estimated savings of $4 million dollars per day. Konig learned the power of micro-efficiency and human-centered design, and monetized the value of technology that helps people and machines collaborate.

Ben Lamm knows his interests and abilities lie in starting new enterprises and letting someone else scale them, as he did with Hypergiant, an AI company that works with infrastructure and the defense and space industries. His lesson is to figure out what...

About the Author

Saemoon Yoon is a Global Leadership Fellow at the World Economic Forum.

Comment on this summary