As a Black woman building a spirits empire, Fawn Weaver had no direct role models. Instead of being deterred, she looked outside her industry to historical titans like Andrew Carnegie. This allowed her to find relevant, industry-agnostic patterns for scaling and risk-taking from proven winners.
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The most effective way to start a new venture is to reverse-engineer success. Talk to 20 successful people, find a business model and lifestyle you want, and "steal like an artist" by applying their blueprint to your own situation.
Top entrepreneurs don't just build a product; they become historians of their domain. They study predecessors, understand market evolution, and learn from past attempts. This deep historical knowledge, seen in founders of Stripe and Airbnb, is a key differentiator and trait of the very best.
Career growth isn't just vertical; it can be more powerful laterally. Transferring skills from one industry to another provides a unique perspective. For example, using music industry insights on audience behavior to solve a marketing challenge for a video game launch.
Jesse Cole's success stems from "parallel thinking"—the ability to identify a core strategy in an unrelated industry (e.g., Grateful Dead's fan engagement) and apply its principles to his own business. This allows him to import proven models from outside his industry's echo chamber, leading to breakthrough ideas.
To break free from industry conventions, prompt teams to examine how unrelated industries have solved similar problems—like how thermostats evolved from simple dials to Nest. Posing questions like, "What if Apple designed our product?" can spur truly novel thinking.
John Catsimatidis became a billionaire by successfully building businesses in three completely different, high-difficulty industries: grocery stores, charter aviation, and oil refining. His story shows that a generative, risk-taking entrepreneurial drive can be more valuable than deep domain knowledge.
Truly great ideas are rarely original; they are built upon previous work. Instead of just studying your heroes like Buffett or Jobs, research who *they* studied (e.g., Henry Singleton, Edwin Land). This intellectual genealogy uncovers the timeless, foundational principles they applied.
Seeing an existing successful business is validation, not a deterrent. By copying their current model, you start where they are today, bypassing their years of risky experimentation and learning. The market is large enough for multiple winners.
Fawn Weaver rejects traditional mentorship, arguing living mentors have incomplete, often flawed, life stories. Instead, she studies biographies of historical titans to analyze their entire playbook—professional successes and personal failings—for a holistic model of an extraordinary life, not just a successful company.
When an industry is new, there are no established paths. Leaders must create novel strategies for partnerships, IPOs, and international collaborations from scratch, turning a lack of precedent into an advantage for innovation.
