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Richard Branson explains why Virgin Group didn’t focus on a single business

Richard Branson’s Virgin Group started out as a mail-order record store in 1970 when Branson was only 20 years old.

Over the course of 50+ years, Branson started new companies in dozens of unrelated industries from airlines (Virgin Atlantic) to mobile phones (Virgin Mobile) to space tourism (Virgin Galactic).

In the process, he broke the cardinal rule of business: focus.

Steve Jobs famously said:

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

But when asked to explain this strategy of diversification over focus, Branson responds:

“I’ve never really thought of myself as a business person. I’ve never really been interested in the bottom line. I really have been interested in creating things I can be proud of, and a lot of those things come out of personal frustration. I must have been frustrated quite a lot when I was young because I ended up trying a lot of things. I just found it great fun.”

Larry Page gave a similar response to Steve Jobs’s critique that Google lacks focus, saying his primary goal was to create an exciting environment for engineers and entrepreneurs:

“I think in terms of motivating ourselves, potential employees, and entrepreneurs. We want to be doing things that are exciting and that are really going to make a difference… Most people don’t wake up and say ‘Oh, I wish I could go work for a company.’ They do it because they have to… I think that’s something we should work to change… I think we need to be more ambitious. We’ve got to do things that matter more to people. We’ve got to do fewer things that are zero-sum games, and more things that really cause a lot of benefit.”

While most startups should probably just focus on doing one thing really well in the beginning, I do think there’s a lot of merit in the idea of making your company an exciting place to work to attract the best talent. Tackling multiple ambitious problems is one way to do that.

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