Irreverence ran on both sides of our family...my parents brought me up to think we could all change the world.

The ability to bounce back after a setback is the single most important trait an entrepreneurial venture can possess.

To be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running

Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.

Look, I think that when we started Virgin Atlantic 30 years ago, we had one 747 competing with the airlines that had an average of 300 planes each. Every single one of those have gone bankrupt because they didn't have customer service. They had might, but they didn't have customer service, so customer service is everything in the end.

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.

Good people have always been at the heart of the Virgin business, and that's largely because we have tried to keep our business small, and our management teams tight-knit. I feel that small, compact companies, are better run. That is partly because people feel more connected in small companies.