

Facts About Entrepreneurs That Will Likely Surprise You - terpua
http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/10561/12-Facts-About-Entrepreneurs-That-Will-Likely-Surprise-You.aspx

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pg
As I was clicking on the link, I was thinking "I wonder if it's just another
one of those bogus stories about the Kauffman Foundation statistics." Yep.

(Bogus because the surprisingness comes not from the numbers themselves, but
from confusing the concepts of entrepreneur and startup founder. The first
paragraph is a prime example.)

~~~
run4yourlives
_It’s based on a survey of 549 company founders across a variety of industries
(that’s my first mistake, as it turns out entrepreneurs start companies other
than Internet software companies — who knew?)_

Paul the only people confused between the concepts of entrepreneur and starup
founder though are people that think all entrepreneurs are startup founders.
:)

I'd say that's a "Valley" focused viewpoint, and it shows a lot about how
insular "Valley" thinking can be. I don't think it's a bad thing to be
reminded that "Start Ups" are a small sub-segment of the entrepreneurial path.

~~~
pg
You seem to be under the misapprehension that I wrote that post. Onstartups is
Dharmesh Shah's site. He's the one who says he was confused about the
distinction between startup founders and entrepreneurs generally. And
incidentally, he's in Boston.

~~~
run4yourlives
Um, no why would I think that?

You're calling out the results on the basis of "confusion", when Dharmesh
clearly addresses this within the post itself. The article doesn't even
contain the word startup at all.

~~~
staunch
OnStartups.com

~~~
run4yourlives
And?

I still fail to see how his very clearly labelled examination of how the
average entrepreneur is very different from the average Valley start-up is
causing so much confusion.

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scotty79
What amazes me is that in relatively short lists of things on internet I often
see duplicates. May this be lists of jokes, arguments even photos. Copies are
usually close to each other, often on the same mid sized page. Is there
something in creators psyche that causes having a blind spot on such
duplicates?

Example from this article:

4\. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their
families to launch a business.

11\. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9
percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

~~~
dshah
This is now fixed (was not paying enough attention and it was too early on a
Monday).

~~~
scotty79
Surely this can't be sole reason for all occurences of this effect on the
interenet (and even in books). ;-)

~~~
dshah
You're right. That's not the sole reason. The primary reason is that
originality is a relatively high bar -- particularly for the Internet.

Just look at Twitter. So many tweets are retweets of what someone else said.

~~~
scotty79
That's not the point. I am not talking about lack of originality. I am talking
about failure to notice duplication in short list of supposedly interesting
content published by oneself.

~~~
alain94040
The reason is plain and simple: when you build a list for an audience, it
needs to have many bullet points. So you are tempted to use the same fact
twice with a slightly different take.

"2 things you didn't know about entrepreneurs" sounds less
interesting/professional/worth reading that "10 things".

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dpcan
The only thing on this list that surprised me is that someone would actually
think the common entrepreneur is "pretty young, living the red beans and rice
lifestyle and working 80+ hours a week and sleeping under their desk".

Up where I'm from, entrepreneurs are typically middle aged, financially
stable, and breaking ground on their new business because they've been working
toward it their whole lives.

I work with entrepreneurs daily in my consulting business, and it's extremely
rare, outside of real estate agents, for me to work with someone under 30 to
40 years of age, with a family, who just started their business.

Why do all these blogs constantly think that all "entrepreneurs" == "startup".
Get out of your box!

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prat
>Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9
percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

the converse of this is more surprising. The ball-park null hypothesis is that
only 0.29% (290 for every 100,000 individuals) should come from family with
history of entrepreneurs - but observed figure is ~50%. From this one should
conclude that entrepreneurship does run in families.

~~~
jwhitlark
I also found this interesting. My father has run his own business full time
for 20 years, and did it part time before that. I think that's a big reason I
started my own business ~2000, though it certainly was not a startup as we
think of the term. A lot of the reluctance to do a startup is simply fear of
the unknown, or thinking there's some "secret sauce" that one doesn't know.
Like most things in life that don't have a prospect of being immediately
fatal, often the best advice is "Just do it"

~~~
prat
"Fear of the unknown" - very well said. In fact, there are some communities
(sindhis, marwaris, parsis in India for example) where the culture of
entrepreneurship has been handed down through generations. Like getting a job
is a way of life and not "unknown" in common families, entrepreneurship is not
an "unknown" in families of these communities.

~~~
prat
Would also like to point out that culture driven entrepreneurship may be
slightly of a different kind than we are acquainted with
(startups/VCs/business plans etc.). These people may have for example started
with being a taxi driver and grown to be the owner of travel company.

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HeyLaughingBoy
Some of the things the commenters find surprising really aren't. For instance
that starting a business when married is risky. If anything I think its
exactly the opposite. My wife started her first (non-tech!) business about a
year after we were married and a large part of the reason is that if she had
done it while single, she would not have had health insurance. She's now on
her second business venture.

A single data point to be sure, but it does lend credence to the idea that
losing health insurance is a significant factor in people not quitting their
jobs to go out on their own.

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Mongoose
So, the 20-something founder/revolutionary is an _anecdote_ and not a trend! I
get it now!

All this verifies is the existence of the silent majority of older, more
experienced founders.

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cruise02
11\. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9
percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

This may be partly due to the fact that if your parents own a business, you're
much more likely to work for them or inherit the business (than if they
don't). Your parents or some other family member owning a company just gives
you an extra option that might make starting your own business seem less
attractive.

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prat
Another dimension that would have been interesting to consider in this study
is immigrant entrepreneurship. [http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/immigration-
india-china-ent...](http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/immigration-india-china-
ent-law-cx_kw_0703whartonimmigration.html)

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raquo
> based on a survey of 549 company founders across a _variety of industries_

~~~
unalone
Entrepreneurs don't count unless they build web sites?

~~~
jeromec
It's the author's own fault. He/she starts off with "(think Facebook, Twitter,
Google, etc.)", then proceeds directly to show the survey reflects a _variety
of industries._ There are vastly different considerations for real world
business versus Internet based ones, and that affects the profiles of founders
for them. (e.g. PlaySpan.com founder was age 10!)

