“Creativity is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration” – Thomas Edison

In the corporate world, there’s a standard ladder to climb to get to the top. In the world of entrepreneurship, there is a similar ladder to climb. Entrepreneurs should start with small ideas and learn how to execute those ideas. Learn how to gain traction, learn from your mistakes, and learn how to make something out of nothing. And eventually the ideas you pursue get bigger and bigger.

I’m a firm believer in execution and follow the Thomas Edison quote pretty closely. The secret behind launching your startup idea is to always move the ball forward on your ideas through execution. Every journey for an entrepreneur is completely different but I’d like to share the process that eventually led to the launch of Skillshare.

1. Exploration & Execution. This is a time for the entrepreneur to creatively explore his/her personal interests, ideas (small or big), and consume as much of the world as possible. For me, this involved traveling around the world, reading as many articles/books as possible, meeting as many interesting people I could fit into a day, and executing ideas.

I also knew that I wasn’t ready to be an entrepreneur so I gained startup experience by working at Behance and Hot Potato. On the side, I launched a ton of small ideas including The Feast Conference, By/Association, World Series of Good, TBD, and Lovely Day. By executing all these smaller ideas, the filter for what I wanted to work on got higher and higher.

The idea for Skillshare didn’t happen overnight. It took 5+ years of climbing the ladder of ideas and immersing myself in a lot of different experiences. There is no rush in understanding yourself and your passions. Keep in mind that most entrepreneurs get stuck in this stage because they never execute anything. The more you execute, the more your learn about yourself and your passions. Your goal at this stage is to find a problem you are truly passionate about solving.

2. Brainstorming & Validation. While I was exploring, I wrote down a list of startup ideas, which quickly became a list of over 100+. From there, I narrowed it down to a few ideas and flushed them out extensively. I brainstormed ideas, sketched wireframes, and did everything else I could to understand the opportunity with Malcolm Ong (Skillshare Co-Founder).

We fell in love with one idea around democratizing education and turning cities into huge campuses, which eventually became Skillshare. Rather than spending nights and weekends flushing out the idea even more, we let the idea sit and marinate for a pretty long time. I personally spent a lot of time validating the idea as I didn’t want to fall in love with it too easily. In other words, I did all the research I could to convince myself this was worth my time, which is the true goal at this stage.

3. Feedback & Commitment. Once I convinced myself this was an idea I’d like to pursue, I asked a dozen really smart people I knew what they thought about the idea with a small twist. Rather than asking them if they liked it, I asked them why the idea wouldn’t work, why it would fail, and why I shouldn’t work on it. Malcolm did the same thing and we eventually had a list of 20-30 huge holes in our idea.

We hit the drawing board again and came up with solutions to plug all the holes. We went back out to a dozen different people and asked the same questions. We repeated this until almost every hole was plugged in our startup idea. We eventually had rebuttals for rebuttals and felt very confident that we should commit to working on this for the next 5+ years of our lives.

Your goal at this stage is to “go all in” on your idea and put your stake in the ground. This was the hardest part of the process for me but once you put your chips in the middle, it’s the best feeling in the world. Remember that you’re running a marathon, not a 5K.

4. MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Malcolm and I agreed that we wouldn’t write one line of backend code unless we knew this was something that people wanted. We did this by setting two really simple milestones: a) 1,000+ email addresses for our alpha page and b) selling out all of our initial classes ( 3 per month for 3 months). We didn’t want to spend too much money on the idea so we set an overall budget of $5K.

I bought the URL and hired Ed Nacional to design the brand identity around Skillshare. From there, we put up the “alpha” version of Skillshare, which took less than a day as it was HTML/CSS. We used Campaign Monitor to capture email addresses and Eventbrite to power all of the ticket purchases. I taught the first Skillshare class around poker, which you can still view on Eventbrite. We needed some marketing juice so I wrote a controversial article on “Why College is Overrated” for GOOD Magazine and we put up a Kickstarter project around the same topic.

We ended up getting over 5K+ email addresses from folks that signed up to be notified about Skillshare. All of the initial classes sold out (huge validation) and our Kickstarter project got fully funded. If you follow the lean startup methodology, you’ll know that most startups don’t fail because of the technology, they fail because they are solving a problem that no one cares about.  Our goal at this stage was to see if anyone on this planet wanted Skillshare to exist. We passed that initial test, kept hitting our next milestones, closed a seed round led by Founder Collective, and launched a full beta site in early April.

This was a very long process for me. It didn’t happen overnight. If Biology 101 is the weed-out classes for doctors in college, launching your startup idea weeds out the majority of new and aspiring entrepreneurs. I failed over and over, but as long as you make the best decisions and take calculated risks, you can successfully launch your idea and make the world a better place!

Michael Karnjanaprakorn is the CEO/co-founder of Skillshare. You can follow him on Twitter and take his class  on”How to Launch Your Startup Idea” through Skillshare.

If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you have an opportunity to disrupt entire industries. The world doesn’t need another “Groupon for X”; we need more companies disrupting archaic institutions like healthcare, education, insurance, government, and banking. We need more companies like Uber that receive cease & desist letters from their city to shut down. And more companies like ProFounder, Votizen, BankSimple, Art.sy and Massive Health that utilize the power of the web to democratize entire industries.

So, the next time you think about starting or joining a company, think about your individual impact on the world. You have a real opportunity to make it better.

“I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned, so it evens up for me.” – Jay-Z

Last year,  I wrote an article on “Five Entrepreneurial Lessons from 2009” which was a very pivotal year for me as an entrepreneur. My 2009 lessons revolved around focusing on focusing, working on the right thing, and taking time off.

There’s a natural progression that entrepreneurs make over time. For me, if 2009 was a year for exploration; 2010 was the year to make a commitment.

At the beginning of the year, I joined a startup called Hot Potato, which was eventually acquired by Facebook. After organizing four conferences, I stepped down from The Feast as the co-organizer. And I ended the year launching my own startup, Skillshare, which is a platform to learn anything, from anyone. It’s been a long journey (you can say a lifetime) so far but it’s also just the beginning. Hopefully, you’ll find some of these lessons below useful for your own entrepreneurial journey. Buckle up!

1. There’s no rush. Climb the ladder. In the corporate world, there’s a standard ladder to climb to get to the top. If you work in banking, you start off at the bottom as an analyst and work your way to the top by becoming a partner. In the world of entrepreneurship, there is a similar ladder to climb.

Entrepreneurs should start with small ideas and learn how to execute those ideas. Learn how to gain traction, learn from your mistakes, and learn how to make something out of nothing. And eventually the ideas you pursue get bigger and bigger.

Your bar gets higher. Your filter for what you work on gets higher. And this is something you can only develop over time by making your ideas happen.

2. Solve the right problem. As I climbed the idea-scale ladder, I spent a lot of time thinking about what would be the biggest possible problem I can solve – something truly disruptive and world-changing.

You can be the greatest idea person in the whole world, but if you’re solving the wrong problem, you’re still solving the wrong problem. Most startups don’t fail because they don’t have a great team, or stellar technology; they fail because they think they’re solving a problem people actually care about.

In September of 2010, I took a think week, which was an enlightening experience for me. It allowed me to make a clear decision on what I wanted to do next with personal and professional life. And most importantly, whether Skillshare was solving a huge problem with a disruptive solution. The power of time off is a very powerful thing to do for yourself.

3. Put a feather in your hat. At the beginning of 2010, I had breakfast with Zach Klein (College Humor, Vimeo, Boxee, Svpply) who convinced me to join Hot Potato to lead their product team. His selling point? I needed a feather in my hat.

At that point in my career, I spent all of my time forcing a good idea/pointless problem. I spent more time convincing people that it was a good idea than actually working on the idea, which is when I decided to scrap it completely to focus all of my time and energy on Hot Potato.

Hot Potato eventually got acquired by Facebook. I got a feather in my hat. And while walking down a random street in NYC, I came up with an idea to disrupt the education industry, which eventually turned into Skillshare. Everything fell into place when I decided to not force or rush my personal journey as an entrepreneur.

4. Finish your commitments. Over the years, I never realized the true time commitment of working on so many different ideas and projects. When we started The Feast Conference in 2008, I didn’t think it would actually expand to a global audience.

It was a good problem to have but that was the downfall of working on so many different ideas. Some of them actually took off and even though I wanted to move on to bigger and better things, I still had to ride them out to the end. In 2010, it took over 10 months to full transist out of The Feast, which sucked a lot of my time and energy away from Skillshare.

As you start thinking about all the ideas you are working on today, you should also think about how to exit out of them if they fail (easy), or transist out of them if they succeed (harder). Better yet, you should ask yourself if this is something you want to work on 5 years from today. If the answer is no, don’t even start.

5. Put your stake in the ground. The most important lesson I learned in 2010! When you’ve climbed the idea-ladder, figured out a big problem to solve, put a feather in your hat, and finished out your previous committments – it’s time to put your stake in the ground. Like they say in poker, it’s time to go all-in!

When that happens, buckle up and enjoy the ride. Because whether you succeed or fail – great things will happen.  Like Jay-Z says, “I will not lose, for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned, so it evens up for me.” Word.

A couple of weeks ago, I headed down to Montezuma, Costa Rica to spend a week at Anamaya Resort for my “think week”, which consisted of a lot of yoga, meditation, reading, and eating. If you haven’t taken a week off to reflect on your past and your future, it’s something I highly recommend. Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerburg, and Bill Gates have done it. You should too. In fact, there have been articles written on the “think weeks” that Bill Gates takes every year:

Just finished watching Waiting for Superman, which was the BEST DOCUMENTARY OF ALL TIME. Go watch it now and you’ll get a $15 giftcard to donorschoose, which allows you to donate money to any education project around our country. While watching the film, I thought of a really simple idea that can revolutionize education in our country.

Why not create a “Kiva for Education” in our own backyard? We need to create peer-to-peer education scholarships. Yes, there are similar things in developing countries (like Vittana), but OUR education is broken and failing here in the good ole USofA. I love the folks that want to change Africa but we need to start looking in our backyard. There’s a 80%+ dropout rate in New Orleans and Harlem. There are many organizations, schools, and teachers looking to turn that number around, and we should support them where we can.

It’ll work just like Kiva/Kickstarter. The parent signs up her kid when he/she enters Kindergarten, and a community supports him/her until she graduates HS/college. Let’s say the kid needs $1,000 per year to pay for school supplies, tutoring, tuition, etc. Ten people sign up and pledge $100 per year. Now the kid has the funds (money should never be a factor for education) and more importantly, ten people that want to see him succeed.

The support system around the student is the secret ingredient here. The money is just putting “skin in the game” for both sides. The student can keep all his supporters updated through the web. And he can start building a relationship that lasts for years with his support network. Another variation of this idea: people can start donating to his college fund. If he/she graduates from HS and gets into college, the funds that have been raised over the years can be released. As you can see, the possibilities for peer-to-peer education funding is endless.

Yes, I wrote an article about the ridiculousness of the college education system (that’s a different beast). But, every student should gain the skills, confidence, and knowledge that result from graduating from high school. Can someone build this for the greater good please?