What is strange to me is that people believe entrepreneurs ever solved "Big Problems". Who in history falls into this class? Thomas Edison? Alexander Graham Bell? Henry Ford? Guglielmo Marconi?

Nonsense, I say. These men didn't solve the "big problems" of their era -- they didn't attack issues that were popular in the public consciousness. They were really much more similar to today's SV entrepreneurs: they created markets, rather than entering them.

We never needed light-bulbs, and we never needed smartphones. We never needed the telephone, or Google. We never needed radio, and we didn't need Netscape either. We never needed cars, nor did we need Paypal, Bitcoin and Square.

The mistake is that thinking the first inventions are somehow more fundamental, just because they're older. That's nonsense.

Big Problems, to the extent that they are ever solved, are almost always solved collaboratively, by coalitions of scientists and engineers, involving both the public and private sector, and the solution rarely appears by flipping a switch. Norman Borlaug wasn't an entrepreneur and he didn't work alone. Ditto Edward Jenner, James Watt, you name 'em, we got 'em. These men were not entrepreneurs (though Watt worked with one).

>And yet, veterans who’ve returned from Afghanistan and Iraq have to wait roughly 270 days (up to 600 in New York and California) to receive the help — medical, moral, financial – which they urgently need, to which they are honorably entitled, after having fought our battles overseas.

>Technology, indeed, is solving the right problems.

Why on Earth would we expect technology to solve political problems?

>Meet the people who have the indignity of being over 50 and finding themselves suddenly jobless. These are the Untouchables of the new American workforce: 3+ decades of employment and experience have disqualified them from ever seeing a regular salary again. Once upon a time, some modicum of employer noblesse oblige would have ensured that loyal older workers be retained or at the very least retrained, MBA advice be damned. But, “A bas les vieux!” the fancy consultants cried, and out went those who were ‘no longer fresh.’ As Taylor Swift would put it, corporate America and the Boomer worker “are never ever getting back together.” Instead bring in the young, the childless, the tech-savvy here in America, and the underpaid and quasi-indentured abroad willing to work for slightly north of nothing in the kinds of conditions we abolished in the 19th century.

Economics: the only field you don't have to study to rant about on mit.edu.

>“What do we have to do with any of this? The unexotic underclass has to pull itself up by its own bootstraps! Let them learn to code and build their own startups! What we need are more ex-convicts turned entrepreneurs, single mothers turned programmers, veterans turned venture capitalists!

You don't have any numbers, you don't have any sources, you don't have any data. You think my only objection is that it's not my responsibility? My objection is that it's insane.

Khan Academy, though, looking at America's education system. Fitbit, targeting the number one cause of preventable death in the developed world. That e-cigarette guy from China, taking on number two. David Nichols and the psychedelic renaissance (not a company but it can't be), bringing MDMA to veterans. Theranos, making blood tests affordable for the 80% of Americans who make five figures or fewer. Prepolarizing MRI. Various on-demand laundry and cooking servies. It's out there. In some cases it doesn't matter: single mothers'[1] problem isn't that they aren't targeted by startups, it's that they don't have any money!

And you know what? It's fucking hard. These companies don't take off like bottle rockets the way Dropbox and Google did. Bringing products to disconnected people in disparate areas who don't like you is a lot harder than selling restaurant recommendations to the other nerds on the train.

[1]: you might be able to make an app so that single parents can find each other and trade-off childcare, but it probably exists already anyway. I'm not exactly Nostradamus, here.

It is really interesting to see that you specify "enterpreneurs", instead of concerned about losing potential great artists, scientists, philosophers.

I mean, where would we be, if the past Shakespeare, Einstien and Newtons were perpetually distracted and preventing them from making works of art and discoveries we now value most?

Having an idea and building a solution is innovation, not entrepreneurship. "Entrepreneurs" are business people who take what someone else built and compete with other business people to sell it to the greatest market at the highest margins, then flog the business itself to some sucker just before it tanks. Someone who imagines and builds needs to be quite profound, whereas someone who takes and sells needs to be quite petty, so rarely do you find innovation and "entrepreneurship" in the same individual.

So I would say innovators are bad at finding their competition, which is the "entrepreneurs". Innovators often get a shock at how vicious "entrepreneurs" turn out to be when the product's almost ready. Even before there's a solution built, many "entrepreneurs" roam around looking for innovator victims who happily advertise what they're doing or even posting their software samples online. "Business is war" to the entrepreneur. Anyone in business who's building and trusting instead of stealing and fighting won't last long.

They solve problems or they wouldn't be relevant. Don't over analyze words and miss the essence of what's being said.

All I am saying is...

There are great entrepreneurs...the few who look beyond the existing paradigm and beyond personal gain to advance humanity as a whole with their discoveries, models, and products. Edison, Ford, Jobs, Knight etc...

And there are good entrepreneurs...the rest who make widgets inside what the great entrepreneurs made, they usually think too much to create anything revolutionary. You run into a few of these every day in every city.

and...

I don't know the author that well or care to either, this particular article was just well written and made a valid point. Some priorities need to shifted around...

The more I meet with entrepreneurs the less I think I can pick them. Sure, there are stereotypes: bright, aggressive, enthusiastic, young, etc. But there are many successful entrepreneurs that don’t come off this way.

The richest vein I have seen is two guys/gals who want to create a tool that they themselves want to use. This describes, for example, Google, Yahoo and Apple. I have come to believe that almost everyone has the entrepreneurial gene — it’s been necessary for survival for thousands of years.

"it's the story of an entrepreneur."

I think there is a big difference. The life of an entrepreneur doesn't have anywhere near the echo chamber that is on the web especially with regards to tech and silicon valley (and as the OP says "Initially it was everything you read on Hacker News"). Yesterday in fact on HN there were all sorts of high fives over a list of "30 under 30" of dubious origins (no mention of the "expert" judges that picked them). PG was right up there with the congrats as well on that.

Back in the day, we had articles in Inc. Magazine (the 80's) and some people read "Entrepreneur" and there was an article here and there in the local newspaper and it was probably more about someone who worked hard then got lucky. I was actually featured in one of those articles and of course it was 7 day a week work as well as luck. But it was definitely not "hit out of the ball park" like you read about today. (I was able to buy a Mercedes at 25 iirc and that was back when they were not as ubiquitous). So there were much less dreamers and more realistic people that entered entrepreneurship then you have now.

Thanks so much for your comments both here and on the original blog. I will try to reply to a few points raised here which I think misunderstand my argument.

1. "This thinking caused the economic crisis" ... I am having a hard time following the logic here. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs ... how did they cause this economic crisis again? I believe the poster is conflating my argument with a view I never made, which is that people should focus on short term versus long term. I never stated this, and no one would claim that a person who only tries to maximize the profits for one day to the detriment of the company for ever would be a successful entrepreneur.

2. As for the bankers in this world, according to my view, they would be complete failures ... as they LOST money by the bucket loads.

3. As for the question of starting a company to change the world, I applaud you. You may be very successful in helping many people. But this would not put you in the same league as Bill Gates, Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs UNLESS your company can consistently make money.

To make my point perhaps a bit clearer, take for example another profession ... brain surgeon. You can be the nicest brain surgeon in the world. You can set up a company that offers free books to children. But if my father needs brain surgery, all of these are side considerations. What matters is whether you can perform the brain surgery successfully or not. That is it.

The same point applies to competitive athletes. They can be fine people, but if they come in 8th in a footrace, they have not succeeded in their job, which is to run faster than their competitors.

4. As for the point about twitter and other non-moneymaking companies, that is exactly my point ... they need to find viable business models. Linkedin is a company that makes money and one I consider to be an entrepreneurial success ... twitter, no (at least not yet).

5. As for Vincent Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, they are all successful scientists. They are NOT successful entrepreneurs, unless you stretch the definition of entrepreneur to a point where the term becomes meaningless. (e.g. "My mom is an entrepreneur because she gave me the wonderful gift of life," etc.)

If you change the definition of a word, you can prove any nonsense. For example I can prove that camels have wings and can fly ... just by stretching the definition of camel to also include all animals with two eyes. This is a logical fallacy.

So in sum, you can respect people like Jimmy Wales or Tim Berners Lee or Linus Torvalds or my mother. I certainly do. But they have not won the entrepreneur game. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin ... Yes. My mom ... no.

Love,

Anjali Sen http://smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com

No. Get yourself out of the filter bubble, because it is seriously warping your understanding of the world.

There are still orders of magnitude more "small-time" start-up businesses in the world than "get big fast" start-up businesses. Your town probably has dozens of them: they're restaurants, roofing companies, independent tradesman, etc. Those people are all doing exactly what you're talking about.

Matt advocates working for oneself is an undisputed ideal, as if it would be better to be an independent owner of a pizza shop than an early (or even not so early) employee of Google.

I think it's likely our generation will have to work harder than our parents and for much less rewards. We have quite a mess to clean up. We'll have to pay for a 10 trillion dollar debt, endless wars, and a generation of retired baby boomers to support in social security and medicare. All this with a declining manufacturing industry and a totally dysfunctional financial system. Contrary to Matt's conclusions, our parents have had it relatively easy.

Starting your own company is an awesome thing to do but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're privileged geniuses for doing so.

Starting with the exceptions, and not the rule, can lead to distorted perceptions. Building a billion dollar enterprise is not the normal outcome for most founders. It is the "odd" scenario.

There's nothing wrong with modeling your entrepreneurial journey after those of billion-dollar founders, but the "go big or go home" path is not the only option for entrepreneurs starting a business.

It is entirely possible to start a multi-million dollar business and still have a life, and I'd encourage more entrepreneurs to talk to self-employed millionaires (there are a lot of them) than read Forbes articles about tech's most visible billionaires.

> It is not accurate to pretend that you are 100%, solely responsible for your own success, without any other contributing factors.

I don't know of any entrepreneur who thinks this way. Not one. Your success as an entrepreneur depends on a myriad of factors external to you. The roads? The power grid? Transportation? Banks? Please. Stop it. It hurts.

How about we all stop and thank Spain then? Without the Crown investing in expeditions that led to the discovery of the American Continent you wouldn't be enjoying that cup of Starbucks Coffee.

Oh, yes, let's also thank our governments for starting wars. Without WW1 and WW2 you might not have penicillin, radios, planes, cars and a bunch of other things you enjoy today. They were brilliant! Too bad they had to kill a hundred million people in the process.

Crazy, right?

Right.

My advise to anyone buying into this kind of thinking is simple: Go start a business. Learn what it takes to actually earn your keep from scratch and even create jobs and be responsible for the livelihood and well-being of families besides your own. Succeed. Fail. Learn. Rise-up and succeed again. Then come back and see what you think of these ideas. I'll bet you a donut you will not think very highly of them. That's the power of reality.

If it creates that perception for other people growing up, they really do a disservice to the world!

In a post-yuppie, money-grubbing enterprenerial climate, they are more likely to invest and work on make-money-quick BS schemes, like social websites and mobile trivialities ("like Instagram, but for goat milk drinkers").

An era which respected industry, infrastructure, and succesful industrialists, etc, produced different results. Musk (and Jobs) were like that -- but 90% of enterpreneurs out there today would model themeselves after Zuckenberg or Systrom instead of them.

"more debt and less risk-taking" is not the "answer[reason]" as the article states.

Entrepreneur today is the same as 'actor' or 'musician' was in the 80s and up. You don't have to be anything to call yourself an 'entrepreneur', you just have to say it. And just like all the out of work actors and musicians, todays 'entrpreneurs' are likely to live the same fate.

I've always hated the word, as it is so full of self-importance and arrogance, I feel like at any moment somebody who calls themselves an 'entrepreneur' could easily add 'bourgeois' as a prefix and not think they sound as stuck-up and foolish.

Don't be an 'entrepreneur', don't aspire to be an 'entrepreneur'. Build stuff, do something. Don't aim for a label. When somebody asks what you do, tell them what you do, not what label you aspire to. You don't 'entrepeneur', you 'make X so Y can do Z'.

Can we please get away from all this entrepreneur BS.