Robert Herjavec was standing outside a Brooklyn Diner, flagging down a couple of New York City police officers, telling them he appreciated them, before walking inside to order matzo ball soup and a pastrami sandwich. That small, unhurried moment captures something the boardroom speeches and cable news hits rarely show: a billionaire who still measures a good week by the quality of his soup. For anyone trying to figure out what separates people who build lasting businesses from people who just think about building them, the gap turns out to be far more practical and far less glamorous than the mythology suggests.
Why the idea is the cheapest part of any business
Herjavec spent much of the week fielding questions from entrepreneurs, and one answer kept circling back to the same blunt core. Ideas, he said, are worthless on their own. ‘McDonald’s did not invent the hamburger,’ he pointed out, making the case that great businesses are almost never great ideas. They are great execution, repeated and adjusted across a long run of small failures. The mistake most people make, in his view, is spending their energy protecting and polishing an idea rather than acting on it imperfectly and recovering fast. He called it constant forward momentum, and he returned to that phrase more than once across the week, partly because he genuinely believes it and partly because he knows most people find the first step the hardest and then stop almost immediately after.
The week included a speaking engagement for a marketing firm that works exclusively with law firms, a niche Herjavec held up as a case study in focus. ‘The smaller you are, the narrower your focus,’ he told the room, using the company’s setup as living proof that owning a small corner of a market beats chasing a large one. He gave a separate television interview about the AI sell-off rattling markets, pushing back on the headline claim that AI spending is outpacing AI revenue. His argument was that the gap has existed for years and will continue for years, and that the companies building their own data infrastructure are making a long bet, not a reckless one.
The question money never actually answers
What made the week feel different from a standard business tour was how often Herjavec turned the conversation toward what money does not fix. He described chasing a moving number across his own career, assuming that each new threshold, first a million, then ten, then fifty, then a hundred million, would finally feel like arrival. The business he sold early in his career went for $265,000, and he described thinking at the time that he was the richest kid in the world. It was only later, building toward a billion-dollar company, that he recognized the absence of purpose underneath the number.
Barbara Corcoran had framed a version of this for him years earlier, and he passed it along: the difference between successful people and everyone else is not that successful people avoid bad days. It is how long they allow themselves to stay in them. ‘Don’t wallow in misery,’ he said plainly, without the softening that phrase usually gets in motivational contexts.
He capped the week browsing a fashion label introduced to him by Josh Altman, where he spent around ten thousand dollars on clothes and immediately called it a bargain compared to what the same quality would cost at a better-known luxury house. He walked past the glass entrance of the underground Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, pointing it out to a companion who had never been there, genuinely delighted that the store is invisible until you step into it.
The soup order that stayed the same
At the Brooklyn Diner, Herjavec noted that he used to order a matzo ball but eventually realized it was essentially just bread.
By the end of the week, the soup was still matzo ball soup, pastrami sandwich alongside it, New York doing exactly what he said it always does: delivering energy you can feel before you can explain it.
