If you can make peoples lives a lot better, you've got a really good business.

Your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen-so long as their needs are being met.

One night, I was chatting with a group of 16-year-old girls over a few drinks about a name for the record store ... A bunch of ideas were bounced around, then, as we were all new to business, someone suggested Virgin. It smacked of new and fresh and at the time the word was still slightly risqué, so, thinking it would be an attention-grabber, we went with it.

My very first venture was a national student magazine to try to campaign against the [Vietnam] War. And so I wanted to be an editor. I wanted to bring the magazine out. And in order for the magazine to survive I had to worry about the printing and the paper manufacturing and the distribution. And, you know, I had to try to, at the end of the year, have more money coming in than going out.

Learning and leadership go together. Too much credit goes to me for what we have achieved at Virgin but the successes happen from working and learning with some of the world's most inspiring and inspired people.

If you can run one business well, you can run any business well.

Please don’t get hung up on this question of whether you need to have experience in an industry before you launch your startup.