Can Entrepreneurs Be Made?

[archerships]

via techcrunch.com

"Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. 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. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simmons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school."

Posted via web from crasch's posterous

Comments

[ipsafictura.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. All three of my aunts belong to the 38% that had an entrepreneurial father, my mother was the only one who didn't ever go into business for herself, and she's a consultant so that's pretty close to entrepreneurship. Of course, none of them started big companies, they had small businesses, but clearly I have entrepreneurial genes.

[pasquin.livejournal.com]

I didn't have anyone in my family who had started a business either. But I do think you have to be exposed to entrepreneurialism at some point. For me, that was an in law.

When I told *my* dad, that after working four years for another guy, running the company, I was starting my own, he acted as if I suggested skydiving without a parachute.

Which it is.