Can Entrepreneurs be Made? | Hacker News Reader

Can Entrepreneurs be Made?

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42 pointshackerbob36 comments

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.

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.

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.

Which books did you find particularly influential?

- The first one, even with all its well-known shortcomings, was "Rich Dad Poor Dad" by Robert Kyosaki. It opened my eyes to "there's another option out there".

- Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (translated into modern English).

- PG's "Hackers and Painters" (why I joined this forum).

- Tim Ferris's "Four Hour Work Week" (has to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, but has many very helpful and practical tips and ideas.)

- "Mastery" by George Leonard

- "Good to Great" by Jim Collins

And finally (and I don't want to turn this into a political flamewar, "grain of salt" applies here as well, etc, etc) but the book that had the most influence on me was "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Unlike all the others on the list above, it's a work of fiction, but I think it is the best at capturing and romanticizing the joy and euphoria that you feel when you build something that works.

good list of books, some of which i've read, all of which i want to read, except this mastery one is new to me. thanks!

"Rich Dad Poor Dad" - wow. Do you also make vision boards on Youtube and ask others if they know The Secret?

C'mon, it's not credible but it's a popular book that gets people to shift their perspective on money (I read it in 8th grade). I think it deserves recognition for that, even if the rest of Kiyosaki's stuff is pure shill.

I would add: The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management by Richard M. White. It is out of print and by Chilton (the auto manual maker) and is dated, but a very fun read. Business is nothing new as this book will point out.

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

How can something be inborn without being heritable? (Unless something is considered inborn if it is taught extremely early in life...)

If a trait is determined by a mutation it is inborn but not inherited.

This is one possible explanation, but I am not a biologist, and I am not sure when the op intended.

Or if a trait is a composite effect of 'sub-traits' from both parents. It is inherited in its parts, but neither parents have the whole trait. What I mean: your dad has A, your mom has B, and AB leads to the successful trait.

Why do different kids of the same parents have different personalities? Presumably they're "wired" that way from birth, yet it's not necessarily inherited directly from one parent.

Genetics probably plays some role (as it does in almost anything), but it doesn't have to be the sole determining factor.

Different kids of the same parents have different genetics. When people have kids that aren't twins, each kid has a uniquely different combinations of genes, which could result in differing personalities as a result of inheriting a different combination of genes from the same two parents.

Of course, people's personalities are influenced by their home life, their experience at schools, and their experience growing up with siblings (which is different amongst kids of the same parents) among a huge range of other variables. I suppose the making of an entrepreneur is similar.

Perhaps a better word would have been "intrinsic". A trait can be a result of compounding, non-shared environment. For instance, at any early age you might have recieved a reward for taking a risk. Perhaps that led you to take more risks, and achieve more rewards. Then you join a social group in which you develop a niche as being the guy who always takes crazy risks. As a result of this, by age 20 being a risk taker is built into your personality.

I agree with this type of interpretation, although I would struggle to call it inborn or even intrinsic. I still see this as a type of learning, albeit from an extremely early age.

If it happens as the fetus develops. DNA doesn't specify the exact composition of a human down to the molecule.

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?

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.

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?

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.'

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

"They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school."

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."

That's the natural tendency toward "mirrortocracy". Most people are disastrously bad at assessing the talent of people who are not like them.

Great word.

It's not mine. Mitch Kapor used it at Startup School 2007.

Then Mark Zuckerberg came on an hour later and preached about how you should only hire young people...

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?

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?

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?

The first two don't make an entrepreneur by any means. The last might have some bearing, but I'd imagine a fair number of people have aspirations and end up not becoming entrepreneurs, and vice versa, so it seems more of an indicator than anything else.

I wasn't implying that I think parents, school, and aspirations makes an entrepreneur... those are just the points that were covered in the article.

I recognize that they do not make an entrepreneur, what I was asking was factors other people think do make an entrepreneur.

my guess is their social situation and their mindset. if they think it's ridiculous to even try, and everyone around them does too, they won't even consider it. if they think it could be worthwhile, but everyone around them thinks it's ridiculous, they still may try, but it's going to require a bit more balls and dedication. but if they think it's a good idea, and even some people around them do as well? that's a big deal.

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 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.

Of course they can be made. The biggest thing that YC gives to the founders it accepts is permission to be an entrepreneur. 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.

i relate to this. the hardest part, in my experience, of getting started with startups isn't the money, knowledge, or any of that. most of that is available easily enough in one way or another. what's hard is getting over the idea that you're crazy for even considering it, and finding people who don't think it's crazy, so you can bounce ideas off of them.

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.

Do you really believe there are large numbers of would-be entrepreneurs who are holding back only because of business taxes?

My favorite lines -- totally resonated with me:

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.

Yeah, when I read that, I couldn't help but think of a crowd of people marching from an office building pumping the goat's head sign above their heads with Twisted Sister's "We're not gonna take it!" blaring in the background.

(probably shows that I am a little old and immature at the same time...)

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.

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.

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".

The first part of this is sensible, but the analogy is not.

Plenty of non-dirtbags get laid a lot and plenty of assholes don't. Unless of course you choose to define any confident, gregarious and/or good-looking guy as a dirtbag, but that would be more defense mechanism than objective quality.

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