From the first days of my career as an entrepreneur, I have always used my own and my team's lack of experience to our advantage. In fact, at our first venture, Student magazine, we used our newcomer status to secure great interviews and generate publicity - people were excited about our new project and wanted to get involved. Our inexperience fed our restless enthusiasm for trying new things, which became part of our core mission.

I think great businessmen are more likely made than born. I don't know if it's from your upbringing, your parental background, the struggles you go through. In my own particular situation, I left school at 15 and I was struggling to survive in the jungle and that was a great education. So I think just getting out there, hands on, learning to survive teaches you a lot.

I never learned the rules in the first place. To change the game is at the heart of what Virgin stands for, so the company culture has always been: "Don't sweat it: rules were meant to be broken."

I think in life the key thing is just to fight really hard to make sure something survives. If it looks like you've done everything you can to avoid failure, just move forward, move on and learn from it.

Be the best at what you do

In the same way that I tend to make up my mind about people within thirty seconds of meeting them, I also make up my mind about whether a business proposal excites me within about thirty seconds of looking at it. I rely far more on gut instinct than researching huge amounts of statistics.

We're introducing separate rooms with double beds in all of our planes so people can actually go with their partner and have a proper night's sleep...