The Erosion of Entrepreneurship
When Growth Forgets Grace
“No business is small, and no religion is bigger than business.”
I have been told many times to be more entrepreneurial. The only way to lasting generational wealth is through entrepreneurship. This is good advice, offered with the best intentions. While my own fledgling entrepreneurial journey has been challenging and rewarding, I cannot shake a deeper and nagging unease about what entrepreneurship has become.
An entrepreneurial outlook develops admirable qualities: the ability to assess and navigate risk, resilience, comfort with uncertainty, strategic thinking, persistence, adaptability and the ability to continue learning. It has also been a tool of social and economic mobility, and has served as an avenue for immigrants and communities to build collective success.
Entrepreneurship has much to offer individuals and society, but we are witnessing a slow and steady erosion of an entrepreneurial ethic. As this foundation collapses, we risk sliding into a hollow and self-serving entrepreneurship, one detrimental to what it can, and has the promise to achieve.
Immigrant Resilience: The Patel-Motel Empire
For immigrants, the choice to start anew, by emigrating or founding a business, demands unusual tolerance for risk: only 60% of startups survive three years (40% survive seven), while immigrants contend with unemployment, prejudice, and dislocation. It is this resilience in the face of risk that makes immigrant entrepreneurship such a powerful driver of opportunity and renewal.
It is a success story evident in the story of Indian motel ownership. In 1999 the New York Times recounted the experience of the “Patel-Motel Cartel” outlining how Gujarati Indians came to dominate the motel and hospitality industry in the United States, “slightly more than 50% of all motels in the United States are owned by people of Indian origin….about 70% of all Indian motel owners - or a third of all motel owners in America - are called Patel.”
This was due to a mix of factors all of which worked in unison: a knack for spotting business opportunity, the drive of a new immigrant population desperate to survive, close familial networks which allowed for financial stability and the ability to capitalise on opportunity, a hard earned reputation for thriftiness and frugality, economic serendipity in the number of businesses up for sale in the mid-70s, and the ugly barriers of discrimination and prejudice which prevented Indians from breaking into existing and well-established industries. There is much to admire in this story, and it is an important lesson for communities seeking to build a foundation for themselves and future generations.
Meritocracy’s Dark Secret
Yet the article also hints at a more insidious nature of entrepreneurship, one darkened by excess. In the late nineteenth century, titans of industry Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, were celebrated as entrepreneurs of unprecedented scale. They transformed entire industries, built fortunes and reshaped the very landscape of American life.
Entrepreneurship has long flirted with the conflation of merit and superiority. As one hotel owner remarks, “But absolutely no one works as hard as we do. I don't want to make a racial thing out of this, but there isn't anyone who can match us for effort, dedication, stamina on the job.'' And herein lies the problem, as this attitude can feed the politics of humiliation and resentment. As Micheal Sandel describes:
“Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune of those who helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs too… A lively sense of contingency of our lot conduces to a certain humility: There, but for the grace of God go I. But a perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves sharing a common fate.”
The result is corrosive: humiliation for those who fail, arrogance for those who succeed, and the erosion of solidarity in between.
Freedom and Its Limits
The dangers of an unthinking and unrestrained pursuit of entrepreneurship are worth considering. Entrepreneurship is seen as a means to an end, and that end for many, is unrestrained freedom or liberty. Whereas the 9-5 workday was once an avenue of stability, security and relative prestige, attitudes to work, life and leisure have shifted along with technological, demographic and social change.
Entrepreneurship promises to throw the cage door open, to free us from schedules, employers, and obligations. But when freedom is understood only in its negative sense, freedom as the absence of obstacles, we slide from liberty into the abdication of responsibility. This negative conception of liberty, as Isaiah Berlin warns, does provide a foundation for a morally just society: “the despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or virtue, or knowledge.” Such a society might technically be free in the negative sense, but it is fragile, hollow, and possibly cruel.
The Problem with Solving Every Problem
Entrepreneurship today comes with its own language: pain points, problems, user experience, value proposition, etc. This vocabulary seeps into daily life, structuring how we interact with the world. To be an entrepreneur is to see everything as a problem to be solved. As Marc Andreesen, writes in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto: “We believe that there is no material problem - whether created by nature or by technology - that cannot be solved by more technology… We had a problem of starvation so we invented the Green Revolution. We had a problem of darkness, so we invented electricity”
Andreessen cites the Greek techne, the capacity to craft, from which we get the word technology, but forgets to mention that for Aristotle, techne sat alongside phronesis, or practical wisdom - the ability to exercise intellectual reasoning, prudence and sound judgment of the right and correct way to act in a situation.
When we see the world as a series of problems to be solved we stop asking why problems are worth solving. As Evgeny Morozov warns, solutionism tempts us to reach for fixes before asking whether we should. History becomes useful only as a catalogue of problems solved, not as a reservoir of lessons learned. In stripping the past of meaning, we also strip ourselves of memory, humility, and responsibility.
Those who supply the most visible and profitable solutions are catapulted into the stratosphere of cultural prestige, the super-entrepreneurs: Jobs, Musk, Gates, Bezos, Branson, Ambani, or Ma. Their success elevates them into positions of universal authority in all others. But the side effect is deeply corrosive: a devaluing of expertise itself. We begin to believe that the ability to generate profit is equivalent to the ability to generate new and valuable knowledge. Profit is conflated with value.
This is how business acumen mutates into unearned legitimacy and authority. Elon Musk’s supposed skill at building companies, now qualifies him to reorganize bureaucracies, advise on geopolitics, and comment on social policy, with disastrous results. Ackman’s success in private equity now fed his delusion of playing tennis professionally. Success in one sphere is taken as a proxy for expertise in another, often in domains that demand expertise vastly different from what entrepreneurship provides. What we witness is not merely the rise of entrepreneurs, but the erosion of trust in the very forms of knowledge and judgment that entrepreneurship once depended upon.
Freedom understood only as the absence of restraint provides licence for the entrepreneur to speak on anything, but freedom without responsibility is not wisdom; it is hubris. And when hubris is elevated to principle, entrepreneurship ceases to be a discipline of building and becomes instead a license to pronounce on everything, often to the detriment of the very society it once helped to sustain.
Reimagining Entrepreneurship
We can and need to reimagine an entrepreneurship that has at its roots a concern for collective well being, an entrepreneurship that is a marriage of craft, purpose, and ingenuity. It is an entrepreneurship that exists, one I know that has sustained communities and allowed future generations to step into a brave new world with hope for a better life. One connected to history, and fed by memory, humility and a shared responsibility. We must define, promote and advance an ethic of entrepreneurship for efficiency, productivity and dignity. We must see entrepreneurship as not an escape from our obligations to society and life, but rather one which deepens our relationship to them.
Thanks for reading.
FK
ps: I had passed around a draft of this piece to my dad and brother a few days ago and my dad remarked, well Farhan this is all well and good, but how can you monetize this? Surely there is some way you can create an income. My brother then quipped - “he must think like an entrepreneur.”
ps: For those of you who want to know where the quote at the beginning of the article comes from - “Raees” the story of a enterprising liquor baron is an entertaining watch. (Trailer Below).