As some of the world’s most successful business leaders have demonstrated in recent years, entrepreneurship is truly one of the driving forces behind the global economy. Indeed, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg have changed the lives of billions of people with their ideas.
But what is an entrepreneur? The question is a complicated one, but the right approach to the subject might help explain why entrepreneurs play such a vital role in the business world.
What Entrepreneurs Do
In the strictest sense of the word, an entrepreneur is someone who founds their own company. In the course of their work, entrepreneurs will usually develop ideas for products or services, write a business plan that shows how those products or services will be marketed and sold, seek out investors to underwrite a business’s development, and help their business reach its full potential.
A Brief History of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurialism has likely existed in some form since the dawn of human civilization. Referring to the act of starting a business or commercial venture, the notion of entrepreneurship could apply equally well to both the founding of the Medici bank in the 15th Century and the founding of Uber in the 21st Century. Historically, human beings have always found new ways to introduce useful business ideas into the marketplace.
Roots of a Movement
In its modern sense, the concept of entrepreneurship likely has its roots in the Industrial Revolution. During this time, seismic shifts in technological innovation and the freeing up of capital combined to give middle class merchants a foothold in the upper echelons of society.
In the 19th Century alone, for example, the wealth of independent business owners in the North of England often exceeded that of the British aristocracy. As the power of the landed gentry dwindled throughout the 20th Century, industrialists and small business owners began to take the aristocracy’s place in the country’s seats of power and political influence.
A New Generation of Entrepreneurs Emerges
In the United States, notions about free enterprise have always constituted a part of the collective national identity. Inspired in part by thinkers such as Adam Smith, the country’s founders worked hard to create a social system that would reward hard work and personal initiative. Throughout the country’s history, self-made figures like Walt Disney and Andrew Carnegie became national symbols of social equality and American ingenuity.
In our own time, however, ideas about entrepreneurship largely stem from a revolution in the computer industry that occurred in the 1970s around the area known as Silicon Valley in California. Prior to this period, the size and expense of computers meant that only universities, government offices, and corporations could own or maintain such machines.
Breaking New Ground
At the time, culturally conservative businesses like IBM dominated the computer market, and few private citizens dreamed that they would ever have the chance to purchase their own computing system. In rented rooms on the Stanford University campus, meanwhile, impromptu gatherings of young computer hobbyists like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became hotbeds of technological theorizing. It was at one of these group meetings that Jobs and Wozniak revealed their first prototype for a personal computer. The world of computing would never be the same.
Over the following decade, companies like Apple Inc. and Microsoft would go on to revolutionize the PC market. The founders of these companies looked very different to conventional business professionals; many were college dropouts who drew their attitudes and clothing styles from the hippie ethos of the 1960s. As their companies became popular, figures like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were treated like rock stars by the media, and the archetype of the late-20th Century entrepreneur was born.
Creating the Gold Standard
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, companies like Apple and Microsoft set the gold standard for entrepreneurship. As the figureheads of these companies, Jobs and Gates became celebrities in their own right. Universities boosted their computer science departments, and a new generation of would-be entrepreneurs aspired to build the world’s next billion-dollar tech company out of their parents’ garages.
To this day, the notion of entrepreneurship remains deeply tied to the history of Silicon Valley’s golden age of computing. Successful entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk still dress in the casual clothing of tech figureheads like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and like Gates and Jobs, both Zuckerberg and Musk dropped out of school to found new companies.
To be sure, it is all a compelling myth, but what is the actual life of an entrepreneur like when the glitz and glamor are removed? For a start, entrepreneurs can wear many hats in a business setting, and as a job title, “entrepreneur” can mean many different things to many different people.
What Being an Entrepreneur Means
In contrast to traditional managers or business executives, for example, entrepreneurs will tend to take on a variety of different roles within the company they found. At some point, they may also hand over the reins of their company to other board members or outside executives. After helping to found PayPal, for example, Elon Musk chose to devote his time to new business ventures like Tesla and SpaceX.
Once a business is firmly established, entrepreneurs may also help other company leaders to push operations into different markets. After founding Apple, Steve Jobs shifted his focus to new markets in education and telecommunications; indeed, while Jobs is primarily known as a key figure in the development of the home computer industry, he also provided the means for an enormous number of public schools to build student computer labs. His later roles in the development of the iPod and the iPhone would revolutionize both the music industry and the telecommunications industry.
Artistic Dedication
This freewheeling approach to problem-solving goes some way towards explaining the popular image of entrepreneurs as dyed-in-the-wool individualists. Usually dressed in a black turtleneck, jeans, and a pair of New Balance sneakers, Steve Jobs seemed determined during his lifetime to show that entrepreneurs should strive to be as creative as possible in their approach to their work.
Indeed, Apple’s famous “Think Different” advertising campaign showed the artistic side of entrepreneurship, and a new generation of entrepreneurs has developed its ethos around that important message.
Using Creativity to Achieve New Breakthroughs
For many entrepreneurs, in fact, an artistic fervor for creating new ideas often lies at the heart of business success, and many entrepreneurs find that the creative work involved in founding a company can be the best part of an entrepreneurial career. Once their latest company has achieved a certain level of stability, many entrepreneurs opt to take a background role in a company’s operations in order to found new businesses and develop new product ideas.
Overcoming Challenges
This is not to say that the challenges involved in building a life as an entrepreneur are always enjoyable. While entrepreneurs can experience many successes throughout their careers, they may also have to cope with the prospect of failure on a regular basis.
Many of the world’s most promising startups never make it past the development stage, for example, and even established figures in the business world are not immune from occasional career lulls. At the height of Apple Inc.’s development in the 1980s, in fact, Steve Jobs was ousted from his the company’s leadership; last year, Elon Musk was forced to step down as CEO of Tesla.
Musk has since made peace with Tesla’s board of directors, and Apple’s top brass eventually decided to rehire Jobs, but the shaky career arcs of these business titans demonstrate that even massively successful entrepreneurs can sometimes experience devastating personal setbacks: As the most visible members of a company’s leadership, founders often receive a disproportionate amount of criticism when a business experiences difficulties.
Striking a Balance
And while it is true that entrepreneurship sometimes involves great risks, it also involves the potential for great financial rewards. The success of companies like Microsoft, Facebook, and PayPal made entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk billionaires many times over. To a large extent, it often appears entrepreneurs have more intense relationships with success and failure than most people in business.
This is particularly true when a startup company is in its infancy. Because most entrepreneurs desire to take a direct role in every stage of their company’s development, they will usually take on the job of hiring new employees and soliciting advice from established business leaders. In competitive markets like Silicon Valley, this process can be extremely difficult and expensive; it can also be extremely time-consuming and frustrating.
A Stern Work Ethic
This is just one reason that so many entrepreneurs tend to work an enormous number of hours when launching a company. Indeed, many startup founders will work more than 100 hours per week to see their ideas through and take care of administrative tasks related to their business. In the early days of Microsoft, for example, Bill Gates had his business partners and staff literally working around the clock when deadlines loomed, and to this day, Tesla founder Elon Musk maintains a punishing work schedule.
The Path Forward
On a fundamental level, what is an entrepreneur? As business mavericks like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have shown, entrepreneurs are always changing the definition of what entrepreneurship can be and what entrepreneurs can accomplish. In an era when counterculture ideals have redefined the values of some of the world’s biggest startups, there can be little doubt that the idea of entrepreneurship will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future.
And while there isn’t one defining quality that applies to all entrepreneurs, there are certain skill-sets that tend to make entrepreneurs successful. A willingness to take risks, a passion for seeing an idea through, and a commitment to working hard are all virtues that entrepreneurs must cultivate if they are to make their mark in the business world.
Truly, that is entrepreneurship at its best!