The word entrepreneur comes from the French entreprendre — to undertake, to take between, to take on a risk. In its earliest usage it described anyone who took on a venture with uncertain outcome. A merchant. A contractor. A street vendor. Someone who woke up every morning not knowing if they would cover their costs by evening. The beggar who positioned himself on the right corner was, by the original definition, an entrepreneur. Risk, uncertainty, and the willingness to act anyway — that was the whole definition.
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"The entrepreneur is the revolutionary of the economy." — Joseph Schumpeter |
Look at what the word means now. The hoodie. The pitch deck. The disruption narrative. The TED talk. The Forbes 30 under 30. The tech bro who raised venture capital from a network of people who went to the same three universities and now sits on a valuation that has never produced a profit, explaining to a conference audience how he is changing the world. The street vendor and the Stanford dropout are supposedly doing the same thing. They are not doing the same thing.
What happened to the word is what happened to the idea. Entrepreneurship became a brand. And brands, by definition, are about perception rather than reality.
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I spent time at HighTechXL in Eindhoven, one of Europe's deep tech accelerators. Nine teams, full of senior executives, PhDs, people with decades of industry experience between them, working intensively on ventures that could genuinely matter — hydrogen infrastructure, advanced materials, complex technology problems that required real expertise to even understand.
Nobody was getting paid.
Think about that for a moment. The most credentialed, most experienced people in the room — people whose time, in any corporate context, would cost serious money — were working for free. Working on the hope of future value. Working because the narrative of entrepreneurship is compelling enough to make highly intelligent adults donate their most productive years to an uncertain outcome.
Call an electrician. Call a plumber. They charge you from the moment they arrive. No discussion about equity or future upside or the vision. They do the work, you pay the price, everyone goes home knowing exactly what happened. There is an honesty to that transaction that the startup world has managed to make seem unsophisticated.
I am not sure the electrician is the unsophisticated one in this comparison.
This is not a critique of HighTechXL specifically — the work was serious and the people were exceptional. It is an observation about the structure. Highly skilled people working freely with the hope of getting something valuable in the future while the capital that might reward them sits elsewhere, extracting value from their effort. That is a very specific kind of arrangement. You could call it entrepreneurship. You could also call it something else.
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Large corporations noticed that entrepreneurship had become aspirational and responded by creating entrepreneurship programmes. Innovation labs. Internal startup competitions. Intrapreneurship initiatives with branded names and dedicated budgets and carefully worded press releases about how the company is now thinking like a startup.
I have never heard of a significant successful spinoff from any of them. Not one that changed the business. Not one that created something that mattered beyond the press release. What I have seen, consistently, is these programmes serving as marketing tools — signaling to talent that the company is innovative, to investors that management is forward-thinking, to regulators that the industry is evolving. The signal is the product. The innovation is not.
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"If you do not take risks for your opinion, you are nothing." — Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
Nassim Taleb's skin in the game principle applies here with precision. If you want genuine innovation from inside a large organisation, the people running the innovation programme need to have real personal downside if it fails. Not a reduced bonus. Not a less favourable performance review. Actual risk. The kind the street vendor took every morning. Without that, you have a committee managing the performance of innovation rather than innovation itself.
The telecommunications sector I spent twenty-five years in is a precise example of what happens when an entire industry confuses incremental optimisation with genuine reinvention. The infrastructure is still largely the same. The business models are compressed versions of what they were twenty years ago. The margins eroded, the commoditisation accelerated, and the response was consolidation rather than creation. Traditional sectors do not need entrepreneurship theatre. They need people with actual skin in the game willing to bet on something genuinely different. Those people are rarely inside the building.
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Nike was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2024. One of the defining brands of the last fifty years, a company that built a genuine cultural and commercial empire, quietly exited one of the most watched indices in the world. The reasons are debated — strategic missteps, overextension, loss of product focus. But part of the story is a company that spent years managing its brand narrative and not enough years managing its actual business. The story is seductive. The numbers eventually tell the truth.
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"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." — Christopher Hitchens |
While we are being honest about things nobody says out loud: the current corporate obsession with board diversity quotas deserves the same scrutiny as the innovation theatre.
Whether a board member is a man, a woman, or any other identity does not determine whether they add value to a board. Their experience, their judgement, their willingness to ask uncomfortable questions and their independence from management — those determine value. A board filled with people who look different but think the same, who were selected for demographic representation rather than for what they bring, is not a better board. It is a more photographically diverse board.
I am also genuinely curious about the consistency of the argument. We have gender quotas for corporate boards. We do not have gender quotas for firefighters, police officers, soldiers, construction workers, miners. The dangerous, physically demanding, unglamorous jobs do not attract the same diversity mandate as the well-compensated, high-status positions. That asymmetry is worth noticing. If representation is the principle, it should apply consistently. If it applies only where the seats are comfortable, then representation is not the principle. Something else is.
Merit is not a perfect system. But it is a more honest one than the alternatives currently being offered.
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And then there is AI. Which changes the calculation on all of this more than any corporate programme or diversity initiative will.
The original entrepreneur — the street vendor, the contractor, the person with a specific skill and a specific customer and a direct transaction — is about to be more viable than at any point in the last century. AI shortens the gap between having an idea and executing it. It removes the infrastructure costs that previously required either capital or a large organisation. The solopreneur — one person, deep understanding of a specific demand, fast execution — is not a romantic notion anymore. It is becoming a genuinely competitive unit.
Not everyone will succeed. The long tail applies — many experiments, most of them failing, a few producing something real. That is the original entrepreneurship. Not the pitch deck and the valuation and the brand narrative. The willingness to try something specific, accept that most of it will not work, and keep trying until something does.
The other thing AI will not replace — and the thing the tech bro narrative completely missed — is craft. The person who knows their specific domain so deeply that the work itself carries a signature. The artisan baker, the master electrician, the consultant who has seen the same problem in thirty different organisations and knows exactly which lever to pull. AI accelerates execution but it cannot replicate depth earned over years. The solopreneur who combines AI speed with genuine artisan knowledge is the most dangerous competitive unit the economy has produced in decades. Not the pitch deck. The craft.
The tech bro had a good run. The word entrepreneur is ready to go back to where it came from.
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This week's insight Entrepreneurship started as a description of anyone willing to take a risk on an uncertain outcome. It became a brand. Corporate innovation programmes are marketing theatre without skin in the game. Board diversity quotas apply where the seats are comfortable and not where the work is dangerous — which tells you what the principle actually is. And AI is returning the advantage to the person with specific knowledge, fast execution, and the willingness to run many experiments. The word is ready to go back to where it came from. |
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