Parashat Eikev

This is #Snapchatorah for where Hillel Fuld takes the Torah portion, learns some lessons and apply them to entrepreneurship and startups.

You know usually I have to extract lessons from the portion to talk about how to build a successful company. This week I didn’t have to look very hard. It’s all about building a successful society. The portion goes into great detail about the Jews entering the Land of Israel, and how to build a successful society. But what’s interesting is there are two contradictory instructions that G-d gives the Jewish people.

The first one G-d says is don’t fear, he tells the Jewish people that the nations surrounding Israel are going to give us a hard time. He says don’t fear. On the one hand he says no fear, anything is possible. On the other hand, he says there is no room for ego. Not everything is about you and you can’t pull it all off. There is a very famous sentence in this week’s portion. “My strengths are what build this successful society”. Ego

Fear and ego have no place in building companies

While those two principles might seem like they contradict.  They actually don’t, they complement each other perfectly, anything is possible when you work together to build a society. It is that balance that entrepreneurs need to strike in order to begin to build a successful company. No fear of competition or anything else, but also no ego.

Let’s not forget that Mark Zuckerberg was told just yesterday not to even go near the Social space because Myspace owns the internet, and Steve Jobs was told the same thing because of Nokia. If you are building something, and no one has ever told you it’s impossible then you are doing something very wrong. Don’t fear those people, learn from them.

While you put fear aside and you focus on execution, another thing you should be putting aside is yourself, and stay focused on the mission. You want to build a successful company, look at the Torah for a guide on how to build a successful society. No fear, but also no ego

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Hillel is a Co-Founder at ZCastApp, mentor at Google, Microsoft, and many other accelerators across Israel. Add Hillel on Snapchat and Twitter