Someone's got a new startup, you know, and they're just not getting traction.

What would you, what advice would you?

Well, the biggest mistake that people make is they build the wrong size company. If you say, I got a great idea, but I need to raise $12 million, it's not a great idea. Because if you knew how to raise $12 million, you would have done it already. Or you need a rich uncle. Yeah say, this is great but I don't make money until Bill Clinton buys it and I just

got to find out someone who can get me in front of him, bad idea.

For me, I went into the book business because every day, this was years ago, the people

in the book business were buying 100 books a day, every day. And they needed me because they didn't have enough books to buy. There's a lot to be said for selling something people want to buy when you're starting. And, you know, so if there's a tourist attraction nearby and you can figure out how to make a T-shirt about that tourist attraction and stand out out front that's a perfectly sized project for

someone doesn't have a lot of money because you're going to find out in three days if you were

right or wrong and if you were right you're going to make enough money to hire someone to tell

sell those shirts tomorrow yeah then you go back to doing what you were doing but you just learn how

to invent a product create a product sell product, make a profit from a product in

three days.

Start there.

Don't say you have this new app that's going to change the world if only 4 million people

downloaded it.

It's the scale issue.

We often pick a project of too big a scale because it's safe because of course it can't

work, so we're covered.

And the last thing I'd say about this I got an

email two days ago they got me very upset and this guy people if you're seeing this you should not send

me email because it's my addiction it's a bad habit I don't want to read any more email but

this guy sent me an email and said I believe that everyone is born with one good idea in life

and I have mine I'd like to run it by you. When I get an email like that, if there's an attachment, I instantly deleted, I never look at ideas. Send it to Mark Cuban. Yeah. Never look at ideas. But I went right by and I say, I can't believe you just said that sentence. Because as soon as you say that, you've set yourself up to not being willing to fail

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