Born or Bred?

Source: Exec Digital Canada

Date :3/13/2008 4:15:43 AM

If you have a hot business idea, staying at college might lose you an opportunity and perhaps you’ll learn more from the people you hire to fill your gaps. Exec asks if the entrepreneur is born or bred.

Written by John O’Hanlon

I have always been fascinated by the conundrum of what makes people who start businesses tick. Jobs dropped out of college to travel India, Gates dropped out of Harvard, current US Entrepreneur Of The Year Isaac Larian did a civil engineering degree – then went on to make dolls.

Is there a business gene? Musicians and artists seem to be born, so, we sometimes think, do criminals, though Dr. Jeff Victoroff, a Neurology Professor, recently said that though it’s tempting to talk about a gene for criminality or aggression, it’s simply not that way: “There’s no such thing as a criminal gene, but scientists have discovered a gene variant that can play a role in violent tendencies.” For criminal read entrepreneur and for violent read wealth creating. I do believe that the ability to make money ethically and incrementally is inherent and can’t be taught.

Here’s a thought: nobody succeeds if they think they know it all already. The most effective business people learn from everyone they meet, at every stage in their career.

Jim Greer

Greer had no formal business education and was ready to drop out of college when he caught the games bug as a summer intern at Origin Systems in 1991. “Richard Garriott was an important influence on me at that time,” he says. “It was he who persuaded me to go back.”

People like him who are trained to build software tend to think systems, he explains, and working at Electronic Arts exposed him to a variety of big company disciplines, however when he started his own business the website came first: he hadn’t any HR, accounting or other administrative resources to draw on, so his sister Emily quit her job to co-found the business with him: “She’s definitely a numbers person, and she was able to help me do a financial plan.”

Early funding, to the tune of $1 million, was secured from PayPal Mafia figures like Reid Hoffman, Richard Wolpert, Joe Kraus and Jeff Clavier. Far more than the money, the guidance that supporters like these can give enables a new company to avoid wrong turnings, he says.

Seth Sternberg

Dropout is a misleading word for someone who left college ‘advisedly’. A first degree like his is valuable in business, whatever the discipline, he says. “Political science makes you study the power structures in society and the mechanisms of influence out there, and that’s a useful thing to know.” But he agrees.…

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