Venture capital is an inherently optimistic form of investment - which is both its primary strength and its primary weakness.

By creating a feedback culture within your office, you ensure that people continue to learn, grow, and challenge themselves.

People who are passionate about Warby Parker are passionate about creating a company that can scale, be profitable, and do good in the world - without charging a premium for it.

At Warby Parker, we moved our focus to promotion only after we'd spent time creating our product, a user-friendly website, and an on-the-ball customer experience team.

It never gets old watching someone receive their first pair of glasses and regain their vision and their life.

If you think about what are glasses, they are the best example of form and function.

At its best, entrepreneurship creates jobs, solves problems, and galvanizes creative thinking.

Self-awareness is a trait - or maybe 'practice' is the more accurate way to put it - that everyone can always improve at. It is part emotional intelligence, part perceptiveness, part critical thinking. It means knowing your weaknesses, of course, but it also means knowing your strengths and what motivates you.

At Warby Parker, we say that we're customer focused but medium agnostic.

Every generation trash-talks younger generations. Baby boomers labeled Generation X a group of tattooed slackers and materialists; Generation Xers have branded millennials as iPhone-addicted brats.

A workplace that encourages self-awareness is an environment where the most productive, curious, and innovative people thrive.

A startup is a company working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed.

Avoid the 'squeaky wheel gets the grease' habit of overreacting to the loudest feedback. The first time you hear a particular piece of feedback, treat it like a clue and do some investigating. Find out how deep it goes - maybe it stops at the surface and won't be an issue, maybe not.

Details matter. They create depth, and depth creates authenticity.

I started off with a company, InfoSpace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy.

I worked for Microsoft until 1996, till I had a different angle to view life. I wanted to be an entrepreneur and control my own destiny.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

I believe that incentivized prizing is the best solution to help unlock the answers to the some of the profound problems that plague our planet.

What separates sports from entrepreneurism, however, is that in business we constantly have to overcome undefined and unpredictable challenges. Athletes train for specific events and conditions, whereas entrepreneurs generally have little idea what they will encounter along the way.

I've been an entrepreneur all my life, and my recent focus is on finding entrepreneurial solutions to address global challenges in healthcare and education.

When you experience a failure as a leader, don't hide it - talk about it. Your missed opportunity will encourage others to take risks.

In the business world today, failure is apparently not an option. We need to change this attitude toward failure - and celebrate the idea that only by falling on our collective business faces do we learn enough to succeed down the road.

I've found that entrepreneurial success usually comes through great execution, simply by doing a superior job of doing the blocking and tackling.

I have absolutely no idea about space exploration. I'm a software guy. But because I'm a non-expert, I've been able to bring the software concept of modularity into the space sector, which was never done before.