Howtonetafortune
HAVING A GREAT business idea won’t make you a millionaire. It’s the execution that will. Such a sentiment is sounded by Wikipedia founder and chief executive, Jimmy Wales.
The brains behind one of the world’s most famous websites, Mr Wales was the keynote speaker at the British Israeli Business Awards gala dinner — the final part of an all-day technology convention, focusing on Israeli innovation.
Spearheaded by trade organisation UK Israel Business, Innovate Israel is being dubbed the largest ever business event between the UK and Israel. It connected dozens of digital Israeli start-ups with UK investors and counterparts during a day of high-profile panel discussions and networking, which culminated in the awards dinner (winners right) at the InterContinental, Park Lane hotel, London.
Talking to JC Business, Mr Wales said: “When starting a business, it is mostly about the execution. There is this myth of the ‘genius entrepreneur with the great idea’ but most of the time, it is all about the execution and getting it right. ”
Wikipedia is an online free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. He acknowledged that “dozens of people had talked about creating a free encyclopedia online but noone actually did it.”
Mr Wales did — in 2001. Today, Wikipedia is the fifth largest website with over four million English articles and 490 million visitors a month.
Mr Wales is a fan of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. “I think that Facebook is quite remarkable; the way they have stumbled a few times but always recov-
British Company of the Year 2012:
Israeli Company of the Year 2012:
Business Person of the Year 2012: er, and the way that they aggressively work on improving their product. They make themselves an indispensable part of the infrastructure. It’s pretty amazing. There were similar networks that came before Facebook but failed because they didn’t understand their customers.”
What advice would he offer aspiring entrepreneurs? “Starting a business that goes under in three years is better than not starting a business at all.
“Having a high tolerance for failure is really important. If you eliminate that myth of the ‘amazing genius idea and everything magically working out’ you realise that there are going to be a lot of stumbling blocks along the way. Sometimes you will fail and have to start all over again.
“Problems can’t be solved by doing the same things we have always done. We are going to have to innovate and come up with new things.
“So by default, innovating new solutions means experimenting and failing a lot, and we need a culture that recognises failure. Israel gets this in a