Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson

I read this book when I was 15, and it changed the trajectory of my life. That is not an
exaggeration.

I grew up in a family where nobody had any business connections. Not my parents,
not a single relative, not even a distant one. Entrepreneurship was simply not on the
map of possibilities for me. It felt like something that happened to other people,
people from different backgrounds, different families, different worlds. Everyone
around me believed the right path was to build a career, ideally in government.
Starting a business was never part of the conversation.

We all know that your environment shapes who you become, and that is absolutely
true. When nobody around you has ever built anything, you do not even consider it
as an option. It is not that someone told me I could not do it. The idea simply did not
exist in my world.

Then I stumbled onto Branson's autobiography. What hit me immediately was that he
started his first business as a teenager, practically the same age I was at the time.
He launched a student magazine with no money, no connections, and no blueprint.
And from that magazine, he built Virgin into a global empire spanning music, airlines,
and dozens of other industries. For a teenager who had zero exposure to
entrepreneurship, this was mind-blowing.

But it was not the scale of Virgin that changed my thinking. It was the rawness of the
story. Branson does not tell a fairy tale. He does not philosophize or polish the
narrative to make himself look brilliant. He tells you exactly how it happened:
constant cash problems, difficult clients, management failures, and moments where
everything nearly collapsed.

The story that stuck with me the most was his decision to sell the Virgin Records
label to keep the airline alive. This was the project that defined him, the business he
had built from scratch and poured his identity into. And he had to let it go because of
debt. Reading that as a teenager, I realized that building a business is not a straight
line from idea to success. It is a series of painful decisions, and the people who
make it are the ones who keep going after the worst ones.

Then there was Virgin's expansion into international markets and entirely new
industries. Airlines, mobile, finance, space. Branson kept entering spaces where he
had no experience, where established players should have crushed him. That
pattern taught me something I have carried through every company I have built: not
knowing an industry is not a reason to stay out of it. Curiosity and willingness to learn
will get you further than credentials.

Branson also opened my eyes to the role of marketing. Reading his book, I
understood for the first time that marketing is not a supporting function. It is the
engine. Branson is fundamentally a marketer. His ability to create attention, build a
brand, and make people care about what he was selling was the thread that
connected every Virgin venture. The underlying message was clear: you can make
almost any business work if you know how to market it. That insight shaped how I
approached every company I later started.

Equally important were his failures. Branson does not hide the projects that did not
work. He writes about them openly, and in doing so, he normalizes failure as part of
the process. For a 15-year-old with no business role models, that was a crucial
lesson. Failure is not a catastrophe. It is a lesson you learn once and do not repeat.
That concept alone probably saved me years of hesitation.

Within a couple of months after finishing the book, I launched my first project online. I
was 15 with zero experience, but for the first time, it felt possible. That feeling of
possibility is the most powerful thing a book can give a young person. It was not a
business plan or a strategy. It was permission to try.

Seventeen years and four companies later, I still think about that shift. I went on to
build a marketing agency that expanded to 70 cities, a VR entertainment company
that hosted over 50,000 visitors, a VR training platform that reached $1M ARR, and
now an HR tech company. Every single one of those traces back to a moment where
a book showed me that someone with no special advantages could build something
from nothing.

I recommend Losing My Virginity to every young person who has never seen
entrepreneurship up close. Not because it teaches you how to run a business. It
does not. But it does something more important: it shows you that you are allowed to
try. And for someone who grew up in an environment where that idea never existed,
that is everything.

Nick Anisimov, Founder of FirstHR