The Mythology of Entrepreneurship

For the past 17 years, millions of people have watched entrepreneurs walk into the Shark Tank and ask a panel of wealthy investors for money. The formula is incredibly simple. Tell them what you created, how much you have sold, and what your company is worth. Then tell them how much ownership you are willing to give away. The Sharks decide whether your business deserves their investment.

The show has become one of the most recognizable representations of entrepreneurship in popular culture. By 2020, the franchise had reached its 40th international adaptation, with versions airing across every continent. The names and cultures change, but the basic formula remains remarkably consistent: entrepreneurs pitch their businesses to wealthy investors who decide whether they are worth funding. ABC describes the show as an opportunity for people from all walks of life to “chase the American dream.”

That connection between entrepreneurship and the American Dream has always resonated with me. My parents immigrated here in the late 1970s and built a life from scratch. For ten years, they owned and operated a sandwich deli, pursuing their own version of the American Dream through business ownership. I grew up believing that America rewarded people who were willing to work hard, take risks, and create opportunities for themselves. I eventually followed that path by going to business school and starting companies. I spent years building pitch decks and trying to raise money because I believed owning a business could give me control over my future.

As my own relationship with entrepreneurship has evolved, I have started to question how we arrived at our current understanding of what an entrepreneur is supposed to be.

The word entrepreneur existed long before Silicon Valley. It comes from the French verb entreprendre, meaning to undertake. In the early eighteenth century, Irish-born economist Richard Cantillon used the term to describe people who committed resources at known costs while facing an uncertain return. French economist Jean-Baptiste Say later expanded the concept to describe someone who brought resources together and moved them toward more productive uses. These early definitions focused on organizing resources and assuming uncertainty in order to create economic activity.

Countless people built livelihoods this way across early America. Farmers, merchants, and craftspeople operated businesses long before entrepreneurship became an identity. Economic independence became deeply embedded in the mythology of the American Dream, although access to opportunity was distributed unequally. American enterprise developed alongside slavery and Indigenous dispossession. Discriminatory laws also shaped who had access to property and capital.

Industrialization transformed the relationship between ownership and work. Factories and large corporations concentrated resources inside increasingly powerful organizations, while more Americans earned wages working for companies. In the early twentieth century, economist Joseph Schumpeter described entrepreneurs as innovators who continually reshape the economy through a process he called “creative destruction.” New ideas and technologies create economic opportunities while making older products and industries obsolete. The rise of the automobile provides a clear example, creating an enormous new industry while gradually replacing much of the economy built around horse-drawn transportation.

The entrepreneur was evolving from someone who operated a business into someone capable of changing an industry.

After World War II, large corporations became an increasingly important source of stable employment in America, while millions of people continued to make their living through small businesses. For some, business ownership represented independence and opportunity. For others, it provided a way to earn a living when education, discrimination, or other barriers limited access to corporate careers. Small-business ownership also became an important path toward economic mobility for many immigrant communities.

An entrepreneur during this period could own a restaurant, retail store, or professional practice. Success could mean creating a livelihood, employing people, serving a community, and passing something down to the next generation.

As small business was gaining greater institutional recognition, the federal government created the Small Business Administration in 1953 to support people starting and growing companies.

At the same time, another model of entrepreneurship was developing. The modern venture capital industry began taking shape after World War II as investors created funds specifically designed to finance young companies with the potential for extraordinary growth. Instead of relying entirely on personal savings or traditional loans, founders could exchange ownership in their companies for the capital needed to grow. Over the following decades, this combination of outside investment, equity ownership, and rapid growth helped establish the model that would eventually define Silicon Valley.

Venture capital introduced a different logic to building businesses. Investors placing money into risky young companies needed successful investments to generate unusually large returns. This placed a premium on companies capable of reaching enormous markets and growing rapidly.

During the 1970s and 1980s, venture capital expanded alongside the personal computer industry. Founders like Bill Gates and Michael Dell became the public faces of companies that grew from small startups into enormously valuable businesses. Their success helped establish a new entrepreneurial prototype built around technological innovation and rapid growth. Entrepreneurship was also gaining greater attention inside business schools as a formal area of study.

The internet gave this model an entirely new scale. Netscape went public in 1995 only sixteen months after it was founded, reaching a multibillion-dollar valuation on its first day of trading. The dot-com boom brought startups into mainstream culture and demonstrated how quickly a company could move from an idea to enormous financial value.

The mythology around entrepreneurship grew with it. Entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Cuban became celebrities whose personal stories were inseparable from the companies and fortunes they built. We became fascinated with their vision and willingness to take enormous risks, often framing their success around an exceptional individual's ability to see opportunities before everyone else. 

By the time I entered business school in 2008, these stories were everywhere. I studied companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks while another generation of technology founders was becoming famous. Business books and biographies gave us endless opportunities to study how successful entrepreneurs thought and worked. I absorbed all of it.

Then Shark Tank premiered in the United States in 2009, as America was emerging from a financial crisis that had destroyed jobs and businesses. The show offered another version of economic possibility centered around building something yourself.
Over 18 seasons, Shark Tank has taught millions of people a vocabulary for understanding business. Revenue, margins, and valuation became familiar concepts while the show created a recognizable prototype of what a successful entrepreneur looks like. The strongest founders tend to be persuasive salespeople who remain confident under pressure. They know their numbers and communicate exactly how they plan to grow.

Shark Tank is first and foremost entertainment, with wealthy celebrity investors at the center of the show. Pitches that can last an hour or more are condensed into a few minutes, emphasizing the conflict and decisive moments that make good television. The Sharks control the room and ultimately decide which businesses deserve their investment. After hundreds of pitches built around this structure, the qualities that make someone compelling on television can easily become intertwined with our understanding of what makes someone successful in business.

This model represents one part of a much larger economic reality. As startup culture grew, the structure of American employment was also changing. Companies increasingly outsourced jobs once performed by their own employees to subcontractors, staffing companies, and franchise operators. Economist David Weil calls this the “fissured workplace.” This created different classes of workers around the same company. Direct employees could receive company benefits and opportunities for advancement, while outsourced workers remained outside its employment system. This structure allowed companies to reduce labor costs and limit their responsibility for the people performing the work.

Millions of people now build their livelihoods across these different structures as consultants, independent contractors, and small-business owners. For creative workers, the relationship between work and livelihood can become even harder to define. An artist may earn directly from their creative practice or use other work to support it, moving between employment and independent work throughout a career. These arrangements rarely fit cleanly into the entrepreneurial prototype we have learned to recognize.

I have spent much of my career moving through these same worlds. I studied entrepreneurship because I believed it offered a path toward independence, and I followed many of the conventional steps by building companies around ideas and pursuing investors. Those experiences eventually pushed me to examine the definition of entrepreneurship I had inherited.

Learning this history helped me understand why that definition felt so powerful. Over centuries, the entrepreneur evolved from someone who undertook economic risk into an organizer and innovator. Eventually, the founder capable of building a company at extraordinary scale became our most visible prototype, or even mythological hero. America connected that evolution to a cultural story about ambition and independence, along with the possibility of creating your own future.

The reality of business ownership is far more diverse than the entrepreneurial models we continually celebrate. Millions of people create their own livelihoods through small businesses and independent work, often with different measures of success.

Understanding how we arrived here has made me interested in what our definition leaves out, and whether we need another way to describe the people building their own path.