An entrepreneur is…. an architect, an artist and athlete. They create new structures, have a vision and must be strong, competitive and always looking to improve their performance. The best entrepreneurs are both leaders and managers. Leaders are those people who create the conditions of trust so that great things can happen. Management is the search for accountability - who does what, when and how, and most importantly, what happens if it doesn't happen. My own strategy as an entrepreneur is to find people who manage themselves and then hold on to these people as they are very valuable to a business.

The best advice I ever got was….invest in myself relentlessly – from my father. He told me that I could do anything I set my mind to. I would test that as a child by announcing crazy things I wanted to do - "I want to be an astronaut or become the President of the United States", and lo - he never laughed.

And the worst was… to hire certain people without knowing them well enough.

The most fun I’ve had as an entrepreneur was…it's all the time; I love my job, but some of the recent fun times would be working with Shaf Rasul to develop the new Dragon's Den Online series, or launching Entrepreneur Country with the Ariadne team, or even celebrating the high points with the Ariadne portfolio companies. The entrepreneur's journey is the hero's journey from ancient mythology with the highs and the lows and the attainment of the big goal - if you are even slightly into stories, you can't help but loving working with entrepreneurs.

I wish I’d never…. doubted myself. Every once in a while, I'll remember how I felt in a situation 10 or 15 years ago, and it bothers me that I doubted my instincts when I was younger. I'm trying to make up for lost time now!!

In another life I’d have been… an actor or a writer - I've always had a strong sense of audience - don't know where it's come from, but after a while you know it's there. I'm an introvert, and maybe it's that there is this big line that I cross every day to "go out to the world" but I know that the real world is inside of me where I create, build, plan, think and reflect.

I said it would never work, but…the Singapore campus for INSEAD [where I went to business school] has been an unmitigated success, and I was very much against it when the announcement came out. I owe a lot to INSEAD , and would highly recommend it.