Vir­gin works in a va­ri­ety of in­dus­tries–you jumped from mag­a­zines to records to air trav­el, and from there to soft drinks, space flights and so on. Do you need to have pri­or knowl­edge of the in­dus­try you want to start a busi­ness in? How have you start­ed up one busi­ness af­ter an­oth­er and suc­ceed­ed again and again?

?Her­nan Gay­tan

Suc­cess­ful en­tre­pre­neurs tend to be in­sa­tiably cu­ri­ous about al­most every­thing, and of­ten they are good at learn­ing by do­ing. Their open-mind­ed, can-do at­ti­tude is among their best as­sets. Her­nan, if this de­scribes you and you're think­ing about start­ing up a busi­ness, you're al­ready on your way!

Please don't get hung up on this ques­tion of whether you need to have ex­pe­ri­ence in an in­dus­try be­fore you launch your start­up. In­stead, think about changes you'd like to see as a cus­tomer; even if you've just no­ticed lit­tle de­tails that need tweak­ing. An amal­gam of those changes may add up to a big idea that leads to a new and tru­ly dis­rup­tive prod­uct or ser­vice.

This is es­sen­tial­ly how we at Vir­gin launched our first suc­cess­ful busi­ness­es. We were very sen­si­ble when we start­ed out, set­ting up con­nect­ed en­ter­pris­es like most oth­er com­pa­nies do. We went from run­ning a small record shop to start­ing up a record la­bel with record­ing stu­dios and then added our large mu­sic mega­s­tores to our port­fo­lio.

Though we were mu­sic fans, we knew lit­tle or noth­ing about any of those busi­ness­es, but we learned that this wasn't nec­es­sar­i­ly a draw­back. We were young and stub­born, and we liked to do things our own way; para­dox­i­cal­ly, our en­ter­pris­es thrived as a re­sult.