Read time: 5 mins
Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?
Ever wondered if entrepreneurship is something that can be taught? According to Dr Thomas Hellmann the answer is a resounding yes.
Transcript
We’re going to think about entrepreneurship as a mindset and as a skill set. And it’s a mindset of taking an unformed idea and giving it shape and direction to create a real organisation.
Can anyone become an entrepreneur?
Now, when we’re thinking about entrepreneurs, the question we usually ask is, am I an entrepreneur? Are you an entrepreneur? I’ve come to think that it’s just the wrong question. I don’t think we need to ask ourselves the question. It’s the wrong question because it’s binary. It says either, yes, I’m an entrepreneur or no, I’m not an entrepreneur.
And that doesn’t do justice to the entrepreneurial process because there are many things going on in the entrepreneurial process. So the better question to ask is: what is my role in the entrepreneurial process, where are my talents and where can they be deployed in your entrepreneurial process? Where will I thrive in the entrepreneurial ecosystem?
And that allows for many more answers and it allows for a much more personalised answer to what you could be achieving. Because there isn’t one entrepreneur. There isn’t one set of characteristics that entrepreneurs have to have. Entrepreneurs come from a great diversity of backgrounds and they have very different ways of looking at the world. They’ve very different ways of acting. So some common myths are that entrepreneurs have to be risk loving. I don’t think that’s true. I think most entrepreneurs manage risk. They’re willing to take some risks, but they manage them. They don’t love them.
Can entrepreneurship be taught?
You might be asking yourself, can entrepreneurship really be taught? Isn’t it that entrepreneurs are just born to be entrepreneurs? Well again, I think that’s the wrong question. Let’s ask a different question. Can entrepreneurs learn?
And there the answer is a resounding yes. Entrepreneurs learn all the time. They learn from experience. They learn from their peers. They learn from wherever they can get that additional insight from. And there’s lots of evidence. For example, venture capitalists pay high evaluations to companies that are run by experienced entrepreneurs who are on their second or third venture. They’re called serial entrepreneurs. So if entrepreneurs can learn, the question of whether entrepreneurship can be taught becomes much easier, which is yes.
Aspects of it can be taught. And let me actually tell you what I think we’ll be able to teach you and what we won’t be able to teach you. We can teach you about the frameworks and the tools for building a venture. What we can’t teach you is the passion. If you’re not passionate about it, these tools won’t take you anywhere.
But if you are passionate, these tools are very powerful. We can teach you to avoid old mistakes. We can explain to you what some of the common mistakes, some of the common traps in entrepreneurship are, but we can’t prevent you from making new mistakes. Every entrepreneur makes new mistakes. And so our hope is that we eliminate as many of the old mistakes so that the only mistakes you make are new mistakes.
We can give you some inspiration of how to think, but in the end, entrepreneurship is about acting. And so it’s going to be up to you to use those frameworks to act and get it done because at the end of the day, entrepreneurship is about getting things done.