Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday: time with family and food is great as is having a reminder to be thankful. Today I want to say how thankful I am for entrepreneurs. For the people who are crazy enough to believe that they can create something from nothing (ok, not exactly ex nihilo, more on that in a second).
Without entrepreneurs there would be no VCs. And much more importantly there would be very little progress. We will eventually figure out how to finance startups through crowdfunding and marketplace mechanisms and the funding and governance roles of VCs will likely be unbundled. But we will not replace entrepreneurs.
What makes entrepreneurs special is that they don’t want to put up with the status quo. They are people who think that new and better products, new and better services are possible and should exist. Saying that I believe in and am thankful for entrepreneurs does not require subscribing to the theory that they are “great men” nor to the theory that we have to tax them less to get more of them.
Bill Gates started Microsoft in 1976 when the US federal marginal tax rate on income was 70% and that on capital gains was nearly 40%. Most entrepreneurs I know who work on interesting problems (as opposed to me-too startups) are motivated much more by the product or service they envision than by financial gain. That’s not to say the latter plays no role, it just happens to be subordinate.
Bill Gates is also a great example for standing on the shoulders of giants. The PC revolution was made possible by the massive previous investments that had taken place in making computer chips. Much of the underlying research into computation and even the construction of many preceding machines had been financed by government.
So as society we can be thankful for entrepreneurs, we can want more entrepreneurs and train more people to be entrepreneurs all without subscribing to specious theories of entrepreneurship and innovation.
