Marion's Blog

Yesterday I had the honour of speaking on a panel in Denver at the invitation of the Wall Street Journal as part of their "Insight Exchange" breakfast series. The breakfasts are hosted throughout the country and moderated by Wendy Bouds, small business editor of the WSJ.

The audience in Denver were all entrepreneurs from the local area - gathered to learn and listen to people like Steve Demos - the founder of Silk, Tom Scott - one of the "Juice Boys" of Nantucket Nectar and Mark Kern, founder of Red 5 Studios - a gaming company. And then there was me. It is always a little daunting to not only face 100 other entrepreneurs, but also to sit amongst such esteemed panelists. What I walked away with most of all though - at the end of a couple of hours, was that entrepreneurs amongst themselves are TRULY inspirational. There was such a buzz in the room, not only because of the panel and what it had achieved in terms of financial and personal success but even more so because of the audience and what it represented.

Whilst the financial crisis is deepening and spreading even further then we ever thought possible - I would invite any politician to come and sit with a group like the one we shared a couple of hours with yesterday. This is where you find the answers to the questions about the future of our economy, the hope that will keep you going and the passion that will make ANYTHING possible.

Steve Demos is an example of the truest of entrepreneurs. He spent 20 years working with tofu, that most bland and often hated foodstuff. His passion? The fact that he believes that people ought to eat foods that are lower on the foodchain in order to change the world's dependancy on our resources. Over the course of those 20 years - he actually developed and tossed out 200 different products - but kept going in the strongest belief that there had to be one thing that people would actually pick up one day. The answer to this quest was Silk - the soy milk that now has taken 2% of the marketshare of ordinary diary products.

It is this passion, which every single entrepreneur that I spoke to yesterday displayed - that really will make a difference to our world, will change how we do things and continually will lead to innovation. Not all of the entrepreneurs will end up with the same publicly known succes stories as Steve, or Tom but many will in their drive to succeed help lead to new things that will have a real impact on our world.

And it is this passion which I find so truly humbling and inspiring. Entrepreneurs are and will always be the essential engine of our world economy - so if you are out there and wondering if you are ever going to succeed, bear in mind that you - as an entrepreneur - are part of this whole process and you should be applauded in the way that a panel is applauded at the end of session. And that there are many people out there like you - and by connecting all those inspiring dots, we can build a safety net that will hold our economy together.

Video of the event