Introduction
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values than simply economic ones.
Famous Entrepreneurs
The entrepreneur is commonly seen as an innovator - a designer of new ideas and business processes. Management skills and strong team building abilities are often perceived as essential leadership attributes for successful entrepreneurs. Political economist Robert Reich considers leadership, management ability and team-building to be essential qualities of an entrepreneur.
The term "entrepreneur" is often conflated with the term "small business" or used interchangeably with this term. While most entrepreneurial ventures start out as a small business, not all small businesses are entrepreneurial in the strict sense of the term. Many small businesses are sole proprietor operations consisting solely of the owner—or they have a small number of employees—and many of these small businesses offer an existing product, process or service and they do not aim at growth. In contrast, entrepreneurial ventures offer an innovative product, process or service and the entrepreneur typically aims to scale up the company by adding employees, seeking international sales and so on, a process which is financed by venture capital and angel investments. In this way, the term "entrepreneur" may be more closely associated with the term "startup". Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to lead a business in a positive direction by proper planning, to adapt to changing environments and understand their own strengths and weakness.
Henry Ford
Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company, and chief developer of the assembly line technique of mass production. By creating the first automobile that middle-class Americans could afford, he converted the automobile from an expensive curiosity into an accessible conveyance that profoundly impacted the landscape of the 20th century.
Elon Reeve Musk
Elon Reeve Musk FRS is an entrepreneur and business magnate. He is the founder, CEO, and Chief Engineer at SpaceX; early-stage investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc.; founder of The Boring Company; and co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. As of November 2021, Musk is the second richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of over US$250 billion.
Lawence Edward Page
Lawrence Edward Page is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of the co-founders of Google, along with Sergey Brin.
Jeffrey Preston Bezos
Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American entrepreneur, media proprietor, investor, and computer engineer. He is the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, where he previously served as the president and CEO. With a net worth of around US$205 billion as of November 2021, he is the second-wealthiest person in the world according to both Forbes and Bloomberg's Billionaires Index.
Born in Albuquerque and raised in Houston and Miami, Bezos graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He worked on Wall Street in a variety of related fields from 1986 to early 1994. Bezos founded Amazon in late 1994, on a cross-country road trip from New York City to Seattle. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to a wide variety of other e-commerce products and services, including video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is currently the world's largest online sales company, the largest Internet company by revenue, and the world's largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services branch.
Bezos founded the aerospace manufacturer and sub-orbital spaceflight services company Blue Origin in 2000. Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle reached space in 2015, and afterwards successfully landed back on Earth. The company began commercial suborbital human spaceflight, and did two successful human spaceflights in 2021. He also purchased the major American newspaper The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million, and manages many other investments through his venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions. In September 2021, Bezos co-founded biotechnology company Altos Labs with Mail.ru founder Yuri Milner.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurship can be viewed as recognizing change, pursuing opportunity, taking on risk and responsibility, innovating, making better use of resources, creating new value that is meaningful to customers, and doing it all over again and again.
Summary
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential. Some startups become unicorns; that is privately held startup companies valued at over US$1 billion.
- Innovation of new products
- Listen to customer feedback
- Continuous process improvement
- Exploration of new business models
- Finding solutions for problems
Unicorns
| # Unicorns | Total valuation (US$ billions) | Date | Reported by |
|---|---|---|---|
| 82 | ? | Late January 2015 | Forbes |
| 229 | 1300 | January 2016 | VentureBeat |
| 208 | 761 | December 2016 | TechCrunch |
| 224 | 772 | April 2017 | TechCrunch |
| 193 | 665 | April 2017 | Inc magazine |
| 266 | 861 | August 2018 | CB Insights |
| 394 | 1200 | August 2019 | CB Insights |
| 495 | 1566 | November 2020 | CB Insights |