The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur

Read with interest an article entitled "The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur" from the Kaufman Foundation site.  Wondered why Dr Wadhwa did not develop a cohort group of non-entrepreneurs and then perform a simple linear discriminant analysis.  

As far back as the late 70's, I remember conducting surveys of hospital patients to determine which responses correlated to which outcomes.  For example, we surveyed chest pain suffers and developed ten questions that predicted with ~99% accuracy whether a person was experiencing a heart attack (Group 1) or another medical condition (Group 2).  In "The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur" the Group 1 members might be entrepreneurs and Group 2 members would be non-entrepreneurs.   Clearly, the predictive questions have to have been part of the original survey but the need for a control group remains fairly obvious.   

As a serial entrepreneur myself, I think back to when I took the leap and want to share a subtle observation clealy not understood by the study organizers.  The types of parameters addressed in the survey, such as parents education, my education level, and my socio-economic status, had little impact on my willingness to leave the safety of being a wage-slave and choosing to be willing 'to eat only what I kill.'   There were many environmental influences acting on me when I elected to take the leap.  Success within a corporate climate gave me confidence.  At the same time, I was frustrated with the inevitable slowness and bad decisions made by large organizations.  I happened to fortuitously bump into a few people who were on-their-own and doing it, which gave me the idea to do it and the belief that I could succeed.  These are the types of things that were big influences at the critical time in my life that I made the decision to become an entrepreneur.  The observation, that recent events more significantly influence our decisions and the trajectory of our lives than do distant events, is carefully documented by George Vaillant in his important book Adaption to Life.  In it, he reports on three longitudinal studies (his was Harvard's 72 year Grant study of 238 classmates from the 1930's who were followed throughout their life).  He clearly demonstrates that what you did this year has more influence on your life tomorrow than what you did twenty years ago.  

I will make one last observation.  To academics and to many of the entrepreneurs they survey, the decision to become an entrepreneur looks in hindsight as very strategic.  It may even be very strategic when viewed in the context of the entrepreneur's life history.   But it feels much more tactical and provisional when you are actually making the leap.  After all, if it doesn't work out you think to yourself "I just go back and get a job working for someone else."