Startupedia

“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.” –Richard Branson, Virgin Group Founder.

A child doesn’t learn to walk from the day he is born, he is encouraged by his parents, he sees his parents walking and he tries to walk and fails and falls several times and then he realizes how to use the support that is available and then tries to walk and practices it till he can walk without that support.

Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is an English business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist. He founded the Virgin Group, which controls more than 400 companies.

Branson was born in Blackheath, London, the eldest of three children of Eve Branson, a former ballet dancer, and air hostess, and Edward James Branson a barrister. Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance; on his last day at school, his headmaster, Robert Drayson, told him he would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. Branson’s parents were supportive of his endeavors from an early age. His mother was an entrepreneur; one of her most successful ventures was building and selling wooden tissue boxes and wastepaper bins. Branson expressed his desire to become an entrepreneur at a young age. His first business venture, at the age of 16, After failed attempts to grow and sell both Christmas trees and budgerigars, he started selling a magazine called Student. In 1970, he set up a mail-order record business. He opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records—later known as Virgin Megastores—in 1972. Branson’s Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980s, as he set up Virgin Atlantic airline and expanded the Virgin Records music label.

Richard Branson did not have an easy entrepreneurship life, he had to face a lot of setbacks and problems but his strength lay with his family always supporting him, and having his back. He like any child saw how entrepreneurship worked, from his mother and learned the ropes and started his own company after a lot of failures and his dyslexia never stopped him from becoming great.

Finally, an entrepreneur is not made in a day, one has to learn the market and understand what the society needs and figure out a product/ service that helps it. An entrepreneur fails many times before he/she succeeds, and entrepreneurship lies in continuing though you have failed.