techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/can-entrepreneurs-be-made -> techcrunch.com/2010/02/27/can-entrepreneurs-be-made/
Vivek Wadhwa on Feb 27, 2010 Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school.
Wilson wrote, "I've been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not." Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I've got news for you: you've got it all wrong.
We found that the majority didn't have entrepreneurial parents. They didn't even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired.
Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. Half didn't even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school. There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner.
study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. But there wasn't a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.
Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. The key is to provide education at "teachable moments" -- when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn't the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.
Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far. One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. These new firms, especially the "scale" firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to US economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups. After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.
This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with "scalable ideas" can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network.
this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes.
blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path -- which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs. The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, "Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition". The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds.
posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population - a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).
He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.
February 27th, 2010 at 11:18 am UTC This article is one of the things a VC should read. Although, I could use some real role models that we, newbie entrepreneur, could look up and see their mind-set so we too, could become successful.
February 27th, 2010 at 1:55 pm UTC Complete and utter BS. Name a truly successful and profitable web venture from the past 5 years. That's because VCs still haven't figured out the internet. They're still pouring money into stupid, dead-end ideas like Blippy simply because nobody really knows what to do with the net.
February 27th, 2010 at 7:16 am UTC Vivek this is excellent work and thanks so much for doing it and sharing it. but i do believe there are unique personality traits that the best entrepreneurs exhibit. it's even more likely that you could learn them from a mentor in a work environment.
February 27th, 2010 at 7:40 am UTC Fred, as you've invested in a lot of the best startups, I'd say this highly statistical evidence doesn't counter your original stance. The best of the best still fits the lemonade stand model. I also think entrepreneurship is becoming easier and easier every day in this country, and something more accepted as normal for almost anyone these days. That's why these stats based on large pools of people aren't biased in favor of the lemonade stand entrepreneur. But if we were to limit the pool to the best startups of the past 20 years, or even just to the startups you've invested in (of which some are the best startups of the past 20 years), then we'd find that these stats mean zilch.
February 27th, 2010 at 7:55 am UTC When I was young, my father came home with a book by Edward de Bono. De Bono believed that intelligence and creativity were skills, not only teachable, but also that the teaching was far more important than the talent you were "born" with. To this date, I think that was the most important lesson my father taught me: that everything can be learned; that if something is important, you should spend the time learning it; Vivek, thank you and the Kauffman Foundation for this research.
February 27th, 2010 at 9:57 am UTC If it is in the traits or in genes , then why is it that students from top notch colleges become entrepreneurs ? I agree with Fred to some extent that not everyone has it to become an entrepreneur.
February 27th, 2010 at 10:47 am UTC Keep in mind that not everyone WANTS to be their own boss either. Think of it this way: If you come from a well-off family and have the ability to do whatever you like (because money isn't an issue) you'll be far more likely to try risky things professionally because even if you fail, you're not going to be finished. they aren't gonna let you work at McDs either if you are halfway intelligent - they'd support/help you even as an adult). BUT, for people who invest in a college education and choose a specific career path, it makes more sense for them to focus on THAT rather than some dream of being their own boss. Because they have no safety net and if all they needed was an idea (because they had money already) than college wouldn't be worth it for them. So when I hear troll-ish, smarmy people like Jason Calacanis say ANYTHING (really, that dude is ultra annoying), I just say to myself, "You're a rich little twirp who has the means to make a business but that doesn't mean it's a business worth doing." That should disqualify him from ever speaking about business endeavors since he obviously can't tell the difference between a good idea for a service AND A STUPID WASTE OF TIME & MONEY.
February 27th, 2010 at 1:01 pm UTC Scott, When I started my first three businesses I was broke, ...
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