Can you teach entrepreneurship? The answer is amazingly difficult and surprisingly divisive. It hovered around the 2017 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards — which took place in Monaco, France, in early June as usual — slipping in and out of focus against more pressing issues such as disruption, automation and the bewildering geopolitics of the moment.
Many of the winners of the regional and national competitions that form the foundation of the competition — which auditing firm EY likes to describe as the "Olympics of entrepreneurship" — just don’t think it is nurture over nature.
For them, entrepreneurship is a kind of personality trait associated with a very specific certain type of person. The stories entrepreneurs tell about themselves have narrative echoes. They are all, it seems, confident, natural risk takers who are experimentally minded almost from birth and are typically positive almost to an excessive degree.
On the other hand, the education business demonstrably disagrees. Increasingly, universities and schools are offering courses in entrepreneurial management at a pregraduate level. At postgraduate level, it just explodes.
The US now has colleges that teach entrepreneurship exclusively. At Babson College in the US, for example, all newcomers are required to do a course called Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship, where they get a $3,000 loan to start their own business. By the end of the year, they’re expected to pay back the loan, donate any profit to charity and shut the business down so that they can experience the full life cycle of an entrepreneurial venture.
Postgraduate courses in entrepreneurship are a huge, global undertaking. Business schools, of which there are now thousands, are premised on the notion that entrepreneurship is not only teachable, but teaching it is a prerequisite for success.
The question is whether they are essentially teaching techniques in management that "real" entrepreneurs might find marginally useful but that are actually aimed at managers in desperate need of entrepreneurial flair in order to fight off "real" entrepreneurs.
It doesn’t help that so many successful entrepreneurs are not so much university overachievers as university drop-outs. The number of dropouts who later succeeded in the technology business is just astounding: Apple founder Steve Jobs, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Dell founder Michael Dell, Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, Uber founder Travis Kalanick: they are all university dropouts. It’s almost as if the question should be asked in the inverse; is it possible to be an entrepreneur and a graduate? As Mark Twain once said, you should not let your schooling interfere with your education.
Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Zuckerberg did eventually graduate from Harvard. Jobs dropped out not because he wanted to but because he ran out of money — though he continued attending classes, famously including the typography class, which is why Apple’s font usage was always so sophisticated.
Gates dropped out not because he thought university was a waste of time but because he thought Microsoft might fall behind if he didn’t give it his full attention. Good choice.
At the Monaco conference, the head of the judging panel, Rebecca MacDonald, a formidable entrepreneur and the executive chairwoman of the Just Energy Group, a Canadian-based natural gas and electricity retailer, said her son tried to drop out of university and she "forcibly" intervened. When he completed the degree, he gave it to her, saying: "This is for you. You wanted it."
For all the dropout legends, the tech business may be a self-selecting misnomer. It’s an industry that requires a particular skill set and that is happening at a particular time.
But entrepreneurs exist across the business spectrum; in other places, deep knowledge, expertise and profound learning both on and off the job are the prerequisites.
In 2014, the Harvard Business Review tried to assess the problem by finding out how old all the US tech billionaires were when they started their companies. It did so by searching their LinkedIn accounts. The results showed that the vast majority started their companies between 20 years and 35 years old, with fully 15% in the 20-25 bracket, and a further 15% in the 30-35 bracket.
But if you set the parameters wider, the results are very different, even in the tech industry. The review also looked at companies with sales in excess of $1m and more than 20 employees. It found the median age at founding was 39. Only 31% of successful medium-sized tech companies were founded by people under 35.
This is much more in line with broader data in other sectors. The average age at which successful entrepreneurs start their own companies is between 40 and 50, according to a wide variety of other studies.
That leaves a fair amount of time for completing a university degree. But it doesn’t answer the question of whether it can, in fact, be taught.
One person directly asking the question at the EY conference was the CEO of Indian tech giant Infosys, Vishal Sikka, who was generous to a fault. He said entrepreneurship was just an extension of creativity. Because all human beings are naturally curious, he concluded that all people could be entrepreneurs, and the facility, therefore, could and should be nurtured.
Beautiful. But is it accurate?
He was also asked whether developing countries would inevitably be left behind in the mad, global race for technological superiority.
Absolutely not, he said. Africa, in particular, could use technology to "leap-frog" masses of legacy infrastructure installed and paid for in developed countries by adopting new technology, as some countries in Africa were already doing.
Once again, very kind but incomplete. Presumably, if you run a company with 200,000 employees, as Sikka does, there is a powerful incentive to be as positive and accommodating as possible.
At the conference, the opposite extreme was set by Mark Cuban, who is not only the embodiment of a serial entrepreneur but a judge on the US television show Shark Tank from which the South African version, among many others, is derived. Consequently, he has not only personal experience of being an entrepreneur, but he judges others who might rise to the challenge.
He started at the age of 12 selling rubbish bags to neighbours in order to make money to buy takkies. He told the forum how he bought a bar at university in order to make money and marketed it by offering dancing lessons. It was closed down for allowing in underage students.
He was fired from his first job as a salesmen for computer software but immediately started a rival and then got caught up in the first tech boom in the late ’90s, eventually selling a company that did what was then called "net-casting" (now "streaming") to Yahoo for enormous amounts of money.
Cuban spent an absolutely enormous amount to buy a failing basketball team ("It was all funny money then"), the Mavericks, which several years later won the NBA. He has 7-million Twitter followers and when he said on television that he was buying Twitter stock as an artificial intelligence proxy, the price jumped 4%.
He is also seriously rich. ("The people who say being rich is difficult are idiots. I can’t find anything bad about being rich.")
Within five minutes of listening to him, it seems obvious why he succeeded and continues to do so; he is sharp, fast, confident, a bit of a jerk and totally relentless. He admits to being "supercompetitive" and loves sport for exactly that reason. "Business is the ultimate sport. That level of competitiveness is really fun to me. I love that," he said. A young man gave him his card at the conference and he tore it up, saying "come back to me when you have achieved something".
He is also worldly and cuttingly insightful. "To run something, you really need to know it yourself. You have to convey a vision [to your staff] and get them to believe in it and get them to trust that you are the person to get us there."
You could not know everything, he said, but if you did not think it was important enough to learn, how were you going to earn the trust of your staff?
Asked about selecting entrepreneurs in the Shark Tank television show, in which judges often invest their own money, he said the toughest part was making sure the entrepreneur could do the job. "I am not worried about the short-term economics. I’m not a ‘hoverer’. I demand e-mails once a week, bad news first. The primary requirement of our job is always learning." Finding people who can do that and then execute, that is the most important thing.
The way Cuban speaks, it seems obvious that to be a great entrepreneur, you need to be born with it, for one reason or another; great desire, natural flair, a sense of the world.
But even Cuban acknowledged that many, many more entrepreneurs were necessary than the world was producing.
It may be that the dichotomy is something of a misnomer. The issue is not binary — either nature or nurture — but cumulative. There are more kinds of entrepreneurship and more types of entrepreneur than the dramatic stories of the peak achievers allow. There is now a class of businesspeople called "social entrepreneurs". Dramatic industry disrupters catch the headlines, but job creation is more often rooted in smaller-scale industries.
It’s here that entrepreneurship overlaps with more conventional business skills, and even if entrepreneurship can’t be taught, those can.
• Cohen was a guest of EY at the awards.
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