6 ms·

Facts About Entrepreneurs That Will Likely Surprise You

59 points by terpua 17y ago

cruise02 17y ago
11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business. This may be partly due to the fact that if your parents own a business, you're much more likely to work for them or inherit the business (than if they don't). Your parents or some other family member owning a company just gives you an extra option that might make starting your own business seem less attractive.
Mongoose 17y ago
So, the 20-something founder/revolutionary is an anecdote and not a trend! I get it now! All this verifies is the existence of the silent majority of older, more experienced founders.
prat 17y ago
>Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business. the converse of this is more surprising. The ball-park null hypothesis is that only 0.29% (290 for every 100,000 individuals) should come from family with history of entrepreneurs - but observed figure is ~50%. From this one should conclude that entrepreneurship does run in families.
- jwhitlark 17y ago
  I also found this interesting. My father has run his own business full time for 20 years, and did it part time before that. I think that's a big reason I started my own business ~2000, though it certainly was not a startup as we think of the term. A lot of the reluctance to do a startup is simply fear of the unknown, or thinking there's some "secret sauce" that one doesn't know. Like most things in life that don't have a prospect of being immediately fatal, often the best advice is "Just do it"
  - prat 17y ago
    "Fear of the unknown" - very well said. In fact, there are some communities (sindhis, marwaris, parsis in India for example) where the culture of entrepreneurship has been handed down through generations. Like getting a job is a way of life and not "unknown" in common families, entrepreneurship is not an "unknown" in families of these communities.
    - prat 17y ago
      Would also like to point out that culture driven entrepreneurship may be slightly of a different kind than we are acquainted with (startups/VCs/business plans etc.). These people may have for example started with being a taxi driver and grown to be the owner of travel company.
HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
Some of the things the commenters find surprising really aren't. For instance that starting a business when married is risky. If anything I think its exactly the opposite. My wife started her first (non-tech!) business about a year after we were married and a large part of the reason is that if she had done it while single, she would not have had health insurance. She's now on her second business venture. A single data point to be sure, but it does lend credence to the idea that losing health insurance is a significant factor in people not quitting their jobs to go out on their own.
pg 17y ago
As I was clicking on the link, I was thinking "I wonder if it's just another one of those bogus stories about the Kauffman Foundation statistics." Yep. (Bogus because the surprisingness comes not from the numbers themselves, but from confusing the concepts of entrepreneur and startup founder. The first paragraph is a prime example.)
- mixmax 17y ago
  Can you point to a better resource or study?
  - pg 17y ago
    I don't know of any. The problem is not with the Kauffman foundation study's data, as far as I know. The problem is all these articles that describe the data as surprising, when most of the surprise is due to confusing startups with small companies generally.
    - startingup 17y ago
      I am not sure I am hot on the startup vs small company distinction, because there exist so many examples of cross-overs. First, there are a lot of tech "startups" (meeting pg's definition) that have preferred to stay small, becoming "lifestyle businesses" as the pejorative term has it (no, it is not my preferred term!). I bet I can think of many that started out as startups, but would not meet pg's definition of startup anymore; there may even be a few YC-backed companies in that list. The opposite also occurs and has occurred, a non-scalable-model based small business morphing into a scalable company. At some level, all taxonomies break down, but startup vs small business taxonomy isn't very strong to begin with.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- run4yourlives 17y ago
  It’s based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries (that’s my first mistake, as it turns out entrepreneurs start companies other than Internet software companies — who knew?) Paul the only people confused between the concepts of entrepreneur and starup founder though are people that think all entrepreneurs are startup founders. :) I'd say that's a "Valley" focused viewpoint, and it shows a lot about how insular "Valley" thinking can be. I don't think it's a bad thing to be reminded that "Start Ups" are a small sub-segment of the entrepreneurial path.
scotty79 17y ago
What amazes me is that in relatively short lists of things on internet I often see duplicates. May this be lists of jokes, arguments even photos. Copies are usually close to each other, often on the same mid sized page. Is there something in creators psyche that causes having a blind spot on such duplicates? Example from this article: 4. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business. 11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.
- dshah 17y ago
  This is now fixed (was not paying enough attention and it was too early on a Monday).
  - scotty79 17y ago
    Surely this can't be sole reason for all occurences of this effect on the interenet (and even in books). ;-)
    - dshah 17y ago
      You're right. That's not the sole reason. The primary reason is that originality is a relatively high bar -- particularly for the Internet. Just look at Twitter. So many tweets are retweets of what someone else said.
      - scotty79 17y ago
        That's not the point. I am not talking about lack of originality. I am talking about failure to notice duplication in short list of supposedly interesting content published by oneself.
        alain94040 17y ago
        The reason is plain and simple: when you build a list for an audience, it needs to have many bullet points. So you are tempted to use the same fact twice with a slightly different take. "2 things you didn't know about entrepreneurs" sounds less interesting/professional/worth reading that "10 things".
raquo 17y ago
> based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries
- unalone 17y ago
  Entrepreneurs don't count unless they build web sites?
  - raquo 17y ago
    The study results would have only been surprising if they were true for web/tech entrepreneurs, otherwise it's all pretty much expected.
  - replicatorblog 17y ago
    They count, and it is an interesting report when viewed through a macroeconomic lens, but a guy who starts a plumbing company or a screen printing shop is in a different situation than a couple Stanford PhD's working on a highly scalable business. The former is extremely valuable, but just not what people who frequent this site think of when they think of starting a company.
  - jeromec 17y ago
    It's the author's own fault. He/she starts off with "(think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.)", then proceeds directly to show the survey reflects a variety of industries. There are vastly different considerations for real world business versus Internet based ones, and that affects the profiles of founders for them. (e.g. PlaySpan.com founder was age 10!)
dpcan 17y ago
The only thing on this list that surprised me is that someone would actually think the common entrepreneur is "pretty young, living the red beans and rice lifestyle and working 80+ hours a week and sleeping under their desk". Up where I'm from, entrepreneurs are typically middle aged, financially stable, and breaking ground on their new business because they've been working toward it their whole lives. I work with entrepreneurs daily in my consulting business, and it's extremely rare, outside of real estate agents, for me to work with someone under 30 to 40 years of age, with a family, who just started their business. Why do all these blogs constantly think that all "entrepreneurs" == "startup". Get out of your box!
prat 17y ago
Another dimension that would have been interesting to consider in this study is immigrant entrepreneurship. http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/immigration-india-china-ent-law-cx_kw_0703whartonimmigration.html http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/immigration-india-china-ent...

59 points by terpua 17y ago

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business. This may be partly due to the fact that if your parents own a business, you're much more likely to work for them or inherit the business (than if they don't). Your parents or some other family member owning a company just gives you an extra option that might make starting your own business seem less attractive.

Mongoose 17y ago

So, the 20-something founder/revolutionary is an anecdote and not a trend! I get it now! All this verifies is the existence of the silent majority of older, more experienced founders.

prat 17y ago

>Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business. the converse of this is more surprising. The ball-park null hypothesis is that only 0.29% (290 for every 100,000 individuals) should come from family with history of entrepreneurs - but observed figure is ~50%. From this one should conclude that entrepreneurship does run in families.

jwhitlark 17y ago
I also found this interesting. My father has run his own business full time for 20 years, and did it part time before that. I think that's a big reason I started my own business ~2000, though it certainly was not a startup as we think of the term. A lot of the reluctance to do a startup is simply fear of the unknown, or thinking there's some "secret sauce" that one doesn't know. Like most things in life that don't have a prospect of being immediately fatal, often the best advice is "Just do it"
- prat 17y ago
  "Fear of the unknown" - very well said. In fact, there are some communities (sindhis, marwaris, parsis in India for example) where the culture of entrepreneurship has been handed down through generations. Like getting a job is a way of life and not "unknown" in common families, entrepreneurship is not an "unknown" in families of these communities.
  - prat 17y ago
    Would also like to point out that culture driven entrepreneurship may be slightly of a different kind than we are acquainted with (startups/VCs/business plans etc.). These people may have for example started with being a taxi driver and grown to be the owner of travel company.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago

Some of the things the commenters find surprising really aren't. For instance that starting a business when married is risky. If anything I think its exactly the opposite. My wife started her first (non-tech!) business about a year after we were married and a large part of the reason is that if she had done it while single, she would not have had health insurance. She's now on her second business venture. A single data point to be sure, but it does lend credence to the idea that losing health insurance is a significant factor in people not quitting their jobs to go out on their own.

pg 17y ago

As I was clicking on the link, I was thinking "I wonder if it's just another one of those bogus stories about the Kauffman Foundation statistics." Yep. (Bogus because the surprisingness comes not from the numbers themselves, but from confusing the concepts of entrepreneur and startup founder. The first paragraph is a prime example.)

mixmax 17y ago
Can you point to a better resource or study?
- pg 17y ago
  I don't know of any. The problem is not with the Kauffman foundation study's data, as far as I know. The problem is all these articles that describe the data as surprising, when most of the surprise is due to confusing startups with small companies generally.
  - startingup 17y ago
    I am not sure I am hot on the startup vs small company distinction, because there exist so many examples of cross-overs. First, there are a lot of tech "startups" (meeting pg's definition) that have preferred to stay small, becoming "lifestyle businesses" as the pejorative term has it (no, it is not my preferred term!). I bet I can think of many that started out as startups, but would not meet pg's definition of startup anymore; there may even be a few YC-backed companies in that list. The opposite also occurs and has occurred, a non-scalable-model based small business morphing into a scalable company. At some level, all taxonomies break down, but startup vs small business taxonomy isn't very strong to begin with.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
run4yourlives 17y ago
It’s based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries (that’s my first mistake, as it turns out entrepreneurs start companies other than Internet software companies — who knew?) Paul the only people confused between the concepts of entrepreneur and starup founder though are people that think all entrepreneurs are startup founders. :) I'd say that's a "Valley" focused viewpoint, and it shows a lot about how insular "Valley" thinking can be. I don't think it's a bad thing to be reminded that "Start Ups" are a small sub-segment of the entrepreneurial path.

scotty79 17y ago

What amazes me is that in relatively short lists of things on internet I often see duplicates. May this be lists of jokes, arguments even photos. Copies are usually close to each other, often on the same mid sized page. Is there something in creators psyche that causes having a blind spot on such duplicates? Example from this article: 4. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business. 11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

dshah 17y ago
This is now fixed (was not paying enough attention and it was too early on a Monday).
- scotty79 17y ago
  Surely this can't be sole reason for all occurences of this effect on the interenet (and even in books). ;-)
  - dshah 17y ago
    You're right. That's not the sole reason. The primary reason is that originality is a relatively high bar -- particularly for the Internet. Just look at Twitter. So many tweets are retweets of what someone else said.
    - scotty79 17y ago
      That's not the point. I am not talking about lack of originality. I am talking about failure to notice duplication in short list of supposedly interesting content published by oneself.
      - alain94040 17y ago
        The reason is plain and simple: when you build a list for an audience, it needs to have many bullet points. So you are tempted to use the same fact twice with a slightly different take. "2 things you didn't know about entrepreneurs" sounds less interesting/professional/worth reading that "10 things".

raquo 17y ago

> based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries

unalone 17y ago
Entrepreneurs don't count unless they build web sites?
- raquo 17y ago
  The study results would have only been surprising if they were true for web/tech entrepreneurs, otherwise it's all pretty much expected.
- replicatorblog 17y ago
  They count, and it is an interesting report when viewed through a macroeconomic lens, but a guy who starts a plumbing company or a screen printing shop is in a different situation than a couple Stanford PhD's working on a highly scalable business. The former is extremely valuable, but just not what people who frequent this site think of when they think of starting a company.
- jeromec 17y ago
  It's the author's own fault. He/she starts off with "(think Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.)", then proceeds directly to show the survey reflects a variety of industries. There are vastly different considerations for real world business versus Internet based ones, and that affects the profiles of founders for them. (e.g. PlaySpan.com founder was age 10!)

dpcan 17y ago

The only thing on this list that surprised me is that someone would actually think the common entrepreneur is "pretty young, living the red beans and rice lifestyle and working 80+ hours a week and sleeping under their desk". Up where I'm from, entrepreneurs are typically middle aged, financially stable, and breaking ground on their new business because they've been working toward it their whole lives. I work with entrepreneurs daily in my consulting business, and it's extremely rare, outside of real estate agents, for me to work with someone under 30 to 40 years of age, with a family, who just started their business. Why do all these blogs constantly think that all "entrepreneurs" == "startup". Get out of your box!

prat 17y ago

Another dimension that would have been interesting to consider in this study is immigrant entrepreneurship. http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/immigration-india-china-ent-law-cx_kw_0703whartonimmigration.html http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/immigration-india-china-ent...