Can Entrepreneurs be Made?

I couldn't agree any more. I definitely wasn't a stereotypical "sells lemonade door-to-door" entrepreneur in school, or in college. Sounds cliche, but I just didn't care about money. I was more interested in hacking and creating, starting from Legos, ZX Spectrum computer, etc.<p>It was only after I entered a corporate hell, was greatly dissatisfied with it, and read some books that opened my eyes on the whole issue, that I realized that I needed to be an entrepreneur to really achieve my dreams.<p>I'm still much better at hacking than business, but I'm learning, and I believe that eventually, with lots of hard work and some luck, I could be as successful as some "natural-born" entrepreneurs, if not more.

Tendencies don't have to be heritable to be inborn. Nor do they have to be expressed to be heritable.

Any "born vs. made" question is poorly defined. I recently decided to leave grad school after 2 years to launch a startup. So, now I'm an entrepreneur for the first time: Was I born or made that way?<p>I remember reading about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the age of 12 and thinking, "Hey, I'm going to do that!" Then I thought I'd be a senator. Or an astronaut. I campaigned for Nader and thought Ayn Rand was stupid. Then I started studying economics and thought I'd be a professor, and maybe Rand was on to something after all.<p>So you could easily argue that I was born to be an entrepreneur if you looked at some slices of my childhood, and you could argue that I was made one if you looked at others. I'm much more interested in well-defined questions, such as: Is the Kauffman Foundation's Fast Trac program effective in making people into entrepreneurs?

This is like saying 'marathoners are not made, they're born'. It's a combination of factors. Lots of people have the entrepreneurial spirit, but are not entrepreneurs. What about all the 'idea' people who don't execute? where do they fall? are they entrepreneurs?<p>Couldn't we equally say the common factor is people who '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.'<p>Is an "Entrepreneur" anything more than a person with a 'get it done, and do it right' mentality?

Substitute "white and affluent" for entrepreneurial in<p>"They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school."<p>and you pretty well have the gist of what Jason, Fred and Silicon Valley VCs believe in. Not quite racism, but certainly when asked "what does a great entrepreneur look like?", their answer is "just like me."

If having entrepreneurial parents, going to an ivy-league university (vs a mediocre college), and having entrepreneurial aspirations early in life doesn't make you an entrepreneur, what does?<p>I liked the article, but it focused on proving the current misconceptions wrong rather than explaining what goes in to the making of a successful entrepreneur. Any opinions on this?

<i>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.</i><p>I think the shock of entering an average large corporate bureaucracy makes a lot of people suddenly very interested in entrepreneurship - I know it's worked that way for a bunch of my friends.

<i>Of course</i> they can be made. The biggest thing that YC gives to the founders it accepts is <i>permission to be an entrepreneur</i>. They recognize it, which is why they beg people who don't get in to keep going since the permission itself has no intrinsic value.

This is something I hear quite a lot from designers that irks me quite a lot. I would hate to ever leave the impression on someone that I thought what I did was a natural born talent they couldnt possibly learn.

They are made by cutting business taxes.

My favorite lines -- totally resonated with me:<p><i>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.</i>

The major problem is this: the default position on a funding position is close to 0 (rejection). It might be 0.001. In any case, it's so low that even talking to a random smart person (who might be the next Sergey Brin) is treated as not worth the time.<p>The people who are able to move the needle past 0.5 are usually not the best bets, but those who are able to project an image that turns the people setting the appointments and holding the checkbooks into impulsive fanbois. These traits are almost never those of visionaries, but those of people-pleasers.<p>It's the same reason why shitheads get laid a lot in college. Only dirtbags are able to convince an 18-year-old stranger to jump into bed with them, because their default position (and for very good reason) is not to do that with a person they don't know. Only the garbage that are able to override that (necessary) resistance are able to have such "adventures".