Admirer of Truth

For the second day in a row, I’d like to weigh in on a contentious debate. The topic this time: Are great entrepreneurs born that way, or can they be made?

Vivek Wadhwa, a very insightful scholar on entrepreneurship, wrote a post on TechCrunch presenting data that he says shows that most successful entrepreneurs were not “born” with a desire to build companies. Instead, they stumbled onto this path later in life. From my own experience, and from my observations of many of my peers, I find his data and his conclusions to be spot-on.

From a policy standpoint, the reason this is so important is that the vast majority of America’s economic growth comes from new ventures. So if we can find out how to scale up the number of entrepreneurs, we can achieve much more vibrant economic growth. As Vivek notes, this is a primary goal of the Kauffman Foundation, who have put together a curriculum to teach entrepreneurial skills to would-be entrepreneurs.

But I want to look back one step in the pipeline: Even if we assume that entrepreneurial skills can be “taught”, and even if we assume that a suitable curriculum can be assembled, how do we make people interested in becoming entrepreneurs in the first place? The conventional wisdom is that capitalism already provides the proper incentives. After all, if you build a successful company, you are likely to become very wealthy. Isn’t that enough motivation?

In my view, people who are primarily after financial rewards are the most anemic entrepreneurs. Instead, most of the men and women who have built America’s greatest companies were not originally motivated by wealth creation. They were just having fun.

Examples of this principle abound. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t build Google because they wanted to be rich. They built Google as part of their grad school research; their passion was data mining. In fact, they didn’t want to even build a company. They would have been happy just licensing the technology. Had Yahoo taken them up on the offer, there would be no Google at all. Going back further in history, Apple was able to market an “insanely great” computer because the Woz was a gigantic hardware geek and had already built a phenomenal product — just for fun. He simply loved the challenge of designing elegant circuits. For a more modern-day example, Facebook wasn’t originally conceived as a business either. Mark Zuckerberg and friends were simply combining two of their passions: hacking code and finding women to date. The result was Facebook. Once it was clear they had a hit on their hands, only then did they form a company.

In essence, all of these innovators were accidental entrepreneurs. They were having a blast following a passion, and only later decided to take the leap to entrepreneurship. Therefore, the big challenge in my mind is not whether or how to “teach” entrepreneurship, but rather how do we get people in our society to better follow their passions? How do we get people to choose a line of work because they find it fun? If we could celebrate a set of social values that places a preeminence on working for fun rather than for wealth, I think we’d see far more entrepreneurship in our country. That, in turn, would create far more prosperity.