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I read the actual research and it seems to me the authors are confounding a lot of things. I believe people with a decent background in business and economics s

I read the actual research and it seems to me the authors are confounding a lot of things. I believe people with a decent background in business and economics should see this. A few things that jumped out at me: 1- The rise of specialized services that lower the entrance bars for many industries. 2- The rise of the wantrepreneur. 3- "Inefficient market offerings" that reduce innovation. The answer to these: 1- Yes by lowering the entrance bar with SAAS products, regular people can create companies more easily. This means many people that shouldn't be company owners are now. But this is hardly a bad thing. The converse to this is that many people who should be entrepreneurs that weren't are. 2- This is really complex. And yes, the ease of starting a business and businesses that service businesses will always play into this segment. But it's hard to blame mailchimp for the rise of the wantrepreneur, which seems to be a logical conclusion if we follow the premise of the study. Since that's not a logical conclusion, it follows the study's premise isn't very sound. 3- As I understand it, inefficiencies in the production of services means more people offering a service than can be sustained by the demand of such services. Such events are normal when industries are in flux. It's actually a good thing, as it fosters competition and the surviving brands are stronger, leaner and smarter than they would be if there wasn't such 'inefficiencies'. I'm really not sure what people see in this study. Even the language used is... emotional? lacking? I mean, it's just not language that lends to nuance and understanding. It's almost marketing like. And I say this as someone who is a digital marketeer, so I'm not using it as an insult. It just feels out of place, I expect analytical language in a study.

Animats 6y ago
I've read Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class", and I don't see that it applies here. The author writes: "This rapidly growing industry has transformed the nature of entrepreneurship and encouraged a particular form of low-quality entrepreneurship. It has done so by leveraging the Ideology of Entrepreneurialism to mass-produce and mass-market products that make possible what we term Veblenian Entrepreneurship." I'd agree with the first sentence, but not the second. We really do have "entrepreneurship as a service" now. Or did, pre-epidemic. Wannabe writes a pitch deck or a white paper, and convinces VCs, Kickstarter users, or ICO investors to put in money. Get space from WeWork, technology infrastructure from AWS, and turn traffic into revenue with Google Ads. Show the traffic climbing and you're a success, even if not profitable. Some such businesses even succeed in the end. The question is, is this diverting people from doing hard, useful things? Like refurbishing buildings in bad neighborhoods. Installing solar panels and inverters. Tree trimming near power lines as a service. Automating meat-cutting plants. Don't know. We don't have enough of the latter, though. Those things have no low-probability big upside, which is what VCs want.
- dnautics 6y ago
  Is it possible that veblenian means in the context of a veblen good?
- petra 6y ago
  Many hard useful things, which once we're more accessible to small-scale entrepreneurs, have became scalable industries by using technology and free money. Solar installations certainly seems that way - it probably runs by big companies/platforms, hiring freelance salesman and installers and offering better financing, web marketing, QA, brand, etc. And of course this ties to "freelancers on demand" platforms, replacing many entrepreneurs. Same could go for tree trimmings, maybe by using sat images to find opportunities, and automating the legal, marketing processes. As for automating plants, there's robots-as-a-service, so this probably creates an opportunity for proven robotic service companies to grow and less for new entrepreneurs. It may just be that the world just needs far fewer entrepreneurs.
- notahacker 6y ago
  I'm not sure why you disagree with the second sentence, especially given your followup paragraph. It doesn't need to divert people from doing 'hard, useful' things to be a form of conspicuous consumption, it just needs people who are willing to accept less than they might otherwise earn in salary to have the social cachet of being a Founder CEO and investors [and sometimes even acquirers] willing to accept lower risk adjusted return to be associated with people and ideas they see as innovative or play golf with other investors in. If Veblen was born a century he'd be dripping with snark - justified and otherwise - about everything to do with the Valley, probably including a lot of the successful exits.
pdonis 6y ago
> it's hard to blame mailchimp for the rise of the wantrepreneur, which seems to be a logical conclusion if we follow the premise of the study Not mailchimp, because mailchimp, as a business, is not focused on providing services to entrepreneurs. It's much more general. The paper is talking about businesses that focus specifically on providing services to entrepreneurs, what it calls the "Entrepreneurial Industry". I do think the paper suffers from a lack of specific examples; I would have liked to see some actual examples of companies that the paper considers to be in the Entrepreneurial Industry.
- wmf 6y ago
  There does seem to be a glut of net-negative "entrepreneurship" resources like low-quality bootcamps, pay-to-pitch events, useless networking events, endless motivational/advice content, etc. Many of these are specifically targeted at convincing people to "live the dream", although I suspect they're more misguided than intentionally scammy.

Animats 6y ago

I've read Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class", and I don't see that it applies here. The author writes: "This rapidly growing industry has transformed the nature of entrepreneurship and encouraged a particular form of low-quality entrepreneurship. It has done so by leveraging the Ideology of Entrepreneurialism to mass-produce and mass-market products that make possible what we term Veblenian Entrepreneurship." I'd agree with the first sentence, but not the second. We really do have "entrepreneurship as a service" now. Or did, pre-epidemic. Wannabe writes a pitch deck or a white paper, and convinces VCs, Kickstarter users, or ICO investors to put in money. Get space from WeWork, technology infrastructure from AWS, and turn traffic into revenue with Google Ads. Show the traffic climbing and you're a success, even if not profitable. Some such businesses even succeed in the end. The question is, is this diverting people from doing hard, useful things? Like refurbishing buildings in bad neighborhoods. Installing solar panels and inverters. Tree trimming near power lines as a service. Automating meat-cutting plants. Don't know. We don't have enough of the latter, though. Those things have no low-probability big upside, which is what VCs want.

dnautics 6y ago
Is it possible that veblenian means in the context of a veblen good?
petra 6y ago
Many hard useful things, which once we're more accessible to small-scale entrepreneurs, have became scalable industries by using technology and free money. Solar installations certainly seems that way - it probably runs by big companies/platforms, hiring freelance salesman and installers and offering better financing, web marketing, QA, brand, etc. And of course this ties to "freelancers on demand" platforms, replacing many entrepreneurs. Same could go for tree trimmings, maybe by using sat images to find opportunities, and automating the legal, marketing processes. As for automating plants, there's robots-as-a-service, so this probably creates an opportunity for proven robotic service companies to grow and less for new entrepreneurs. It may just be that the world just needs far fewer entrepreneurs.
notahacker 6y ago
I'm not sure why you disagree with the second sentence, especially given your followup paragraph. It doesn't need to divert people from doing 'hard, useful' things to be a form of conspicuous consumption, it just needs people who are willing to accept less than they might otherwise earn in salary to have the social cachet of being a Founder CEO and investors [and sometimes even acquirers] willing to accept lower risk adjusted return to be associated with people and ideas they see as innovative or play golf with other investors in. If Veblen was born a century he'd be dripping with snark - justified and otherwise - about everything to do with the Valley, probably including a lot of the successful exits.

pdonis 6y ago

> it's hard to blame mailchimp for the rise of the wantrepreneur, which seems to be a logical conclusion if we follow the premise of the study Not mailchimp, because mailchimp, as a business, is not focused on providing services to entrepreneurs. It's much more general. The paper is talking about businesses that focus specifically on providing services to entrepreneurs, what it calls the "Entrepreneurial Industry". I do think the paper suffers from a lack of specific examples; I would have liked to see some actual examples of companies that the paper considers to be in the Entrepreneurial Industry.

wmf 6y ago
There does seem to be a glut of net-negative "entrepreneurship" resources like low-quality bootcamps, pay-to-pitch events, useless networking events, endless motivational/advice content, etc. Many of these are specifically targeted at convincing people to "live the dream", although I suspect they're more misguided than intentionally scammy.