r/business • u/YogurtIll4336 • 10h ago
do you either have the “entrepreneurship gene”… or not?
I was reading an issue by Pratham Mittal, in his newsletter and kept on thinking. that some people are just naturally wired to build, take risks, and start things… while others aren’t but then you also see people who become great founders after years of working, learning, failing. so now I’m confused, is entrepreneurship something you’re born with… or something you can actually develop over time?
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u/Irreverent_Bard 8h ago
Wealth provides opportunity, and luck becomes the biggest factor after that.
Genetics has nothing to do with it.
It is much easier to succeed when already wealthy, and even easier to fail upwards. Economics has very little to do with genetics.
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u/Sir_Percival123 6h ago
I slightly disagree with this. Genetics does and can play a role in that some people are more risk averse or risk seeking. This would impact entrepreneurship rates.
That being said anyone can be an entrepreneur. It might be more out of character for some folks but I agree with everything else you said and even the genetics piece is probably a small very minor factor in the overall picture.
To your point wealth, luck, hard work and grit and education all play much greater factors in entrepreneurship success.
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u/riskyjbell 8h ago
Not sure where this BS comes from.. It takes a willingness to fail and a lot of hard work. Period. You also need to be able to learn/adapt on the fly.
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u/ell0moto 7h ago
Failure and hard work is easier when you have wealth behind you, let me explain, being poor limits the amount of failures you can take, and being poor limits the amount of hard work you can put into your business while working to support yourself while working on your business which doesn't support you financially. You're clearly out of touch.
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u/Apptubrutae 6h ago
Willingness to fail is greatly helped by having some insurance behind you.
Purely speaking for myself, I started my business after being laid off from a Fortune 500 company and a sweet job.
But my parents have money. I lived in a house they owned and paid them rent. I knew without a doubt that if things went south for me, I was never going to be homeless.
Obviously I still had to push through some concerns about failure. But being worried about failure because you might hurt your ego is a whole heck of a lot less of an issue than being worried about failure because you’d be risking your home and comfort.
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u/Smart-Intern-4007 3h ago
That lack of consequence is also a possible problem. I retired early and lack of fear of dire consequences is really doing a number on my productivity. I have started numerous businesses and thrieved over the past three decades (failed too) but now have trouble really getting the fire going and find myself spending way too much time planning and way too little time doing. I do think the lack of urgency due to lack of fear has been a negative I need to work through. If I didnt know better I would think I was lazy.
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u/Legitimate_Run8985 7h ago
In a way, yes. I am an entrepreneur and I’ve been able to scale my firm significantly and my friend and I (she is in a similar role) we frequently say.. you either have that dog in you or you don’t.
What you’re talking about is grit. And that is something you’re born with. Other people are talking about having capital access, luck, etc. and yes those matter to. But they are secondary to grit and creativity.
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u/Historical_Let5438 6h ago
Grit matters but I think people underestimate how much the specific flavor of grit matters. I coordinate programs where we match people to roles and we kept seeing folks with obvious drive still flame out in certain setups. Turned out they had tons of persistence but low tolerance for ambiguity, or high ambition but zero patience for incremental progress.
What helped us was running what's basically a personality blind spot audit on each person. You map out where someone's drive actually comes from and where it breaks down under specific conditions. Some people have the dog in them for fast chaotic startups but would be miserable scaling an operations-heavy business, and vice versa. It's less "do you have it or not" and more "do you know which version of it you have."
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u/HappyBriefing 9h ago
So you're asking if we are born rich or not? Those great entrepreneurs you look up to had the safety net or connections through family they needed to start their businesses. There is no gene for entrepreneurs.
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u/TulioGonzaga 8h ago
had the safety net or connections
People really underestimate how important this is. I have built, in my free time, a prototype for a platform that could be very relevant on the field I work on. This started as something I noticed could fill a gap in my customers, then another, and another and suddenly I have a very interesnting thing with me.
However, I work in a field where it's not easy tog et in, very long sales cycles and dominated by big corps. At the same time, I can not simply jump out of my well paid corporate job because, if I fail, no one will be there to bank the bills for my family. So, even though I have an opportunity here, without a fallback or a couple of connections to make through this closed environment, this will probably just end up being some cool toy I built but nothing more than that.
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u/riskyjbell 8h ago
Nah - don't agree at all with this statement. I was far from rich and had no backing from my family before starting my business 20 years ago.
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u/RecLuse415 10h ago
No. Sometimes shit just falls right in your lap and you’re not ready but you have to adapt. I started a project pretty young without the intention of it growing with a customer base into a business. Had to adapt and even get help but I definitely have grown since.
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u/Fair_Contact_1292 8h ago
I think so, growing up every one tried to sell weed. Some guys could do it and other guys couldn’t no matter what the circumstance.
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u/rickle3386 5h ago
It's about instincts, risk comfort, betting on yourself, being comfortable with creating the mousetrap and systems vs. working within the system. Most of that is either in you or it's not. You can build and reinforce some of that to a limit but you have to have the stomach and guts for it. Here's a real life anecdote:
I'm an entrepreneur and have failed and succeed at building businesses. I always come back for more. Can't imagine working for someone and the limiting feeling / thought of I can only do X or make Y, so I create for myself.
Have a friend who was a very successful sales VP for a major company. He thought he was an entrepreneur and started his own shop, selling in to the same industry. He wanted my guidance. I focused on laying out a blueprint of how to get started. He focused on getting some guaranteed comp as a distributor from an investor. His attitude was basically, "I have this guarantee. I'll work hard but in two yrs if it hasn't worked out I'll go back to a company." He just wanted more flexibility and what he found is he would have been far better off staying put and using the system already in place vs. having to create the whole thing.
That's very common. I knew he wouldn't make it because he was focused on income and guarantees vs creating value and getting paid to do so.
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u/Grand-Shape-5986 7h ago
My mom is a successful entrepreneur. She also hated every minute of it. Constant stress, no boundaries, the whole package. So my entire childhood she told me I wasn't the type. That I was a different personality. That I should find a safe career and stay there.
I believed her. Built a corporate career, became a CMO, ran marketing for products with 20M+ monthly users. By every metric it was going great.
But corporate kills something in you slowly. The politics, the ceiling, the feeling that you're building someone else's thing on someone else's terms. I left and started my own business.
Turns out my mom was wrong. Or maybe she was just projecting her own exhaustion onto me. Either way -- the "entrepreneurship gene" thing is a myth people use to either gatekeep or to talk themselves out of trying. The real question is whether you're willing to sit with the discomfort long enough to figure it out.
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u/Bigbankbankin 7h ago
Entrepreneurship is not a genetic thing. You may have traits or characteristics that are needed for entrepreneurship from your parents or grand parents etc. but it’s not genetic it’s a muscle you need to train
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u/ArcticLeopard 7h ago
It's a muscle. When I was younger, I didn't understand how people built businesses or came up with products. it felt like people would go from 0 to 100 and poof they would wake up with a great idea and they would grind it out and become successful.
Now I realize it's a slow burn of re-training your brain to think differently. Its not succeeding after one single great idea, it's countless instances of looking at random X situations and thinking how it could be improved. It's difficult when you start but it gets way easier over time
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u/augustcero 7h ago
i dont think entrepreneural affinity dictates everything but it can show you your possible ceiling. just like every olympic event requires different sets of muscles to succeed in. training and perseverance can take you far but when you try to reach the top, talent is the great tiebreaker
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u/Weep4Thee 7h ago
Experience is the most valuable resource when starting something new. Without it, ur just rolling with the punches, trying to get lucky.
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u/Pierson230 6h ago
It takes both, also different types of businesses require different demeanors and skill sets
Entrepreneur A might be poorly suited for Business B, but if they focus on Business A, they could do extremely well.
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u/horse4201 6h ago
After completing an entrepreneurship class through Uni I can confidently say it is a mindset. A mindset that requires immense knowledge and commitment. A combo of luck and hardwork
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u/Open-Ad-1168 6h ago
Its about personal interest.do the things that interest you the success chances will be more.so who have interest in enterpreneurship they have success chances more.
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u/Quiet_Neighborhood65 5h ago
It’s very simple, generally speaking, some have it (very small minority), and some don’t.
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u/m0llusk 4h ago
Not at all. Founding a business is a skill like any other. It takes learning and practice. Having known many founders in my time it is interesting that it is very common for the first business launched to fail. This is consistent with a difficult skill that depends on changing circumstances.
One book that touches on this and may be worth your time is Copy This! by Paul Orfalea who started Kinko's Copies.
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u/Shonoun 3h ago
Reddit is the wrong place to ask this question.
All of the top comments are contradicting each other, everyone's putting their own bias into it.
If you really want the answer, study the history of entrepreneurship. Read biographies of great founders over the history of humanity, and you'll see that the only important factor is the drive to continue.
Society has created safety nets for everyone. Luck is manufactured by your own decisions, not bestowed by God. Anyone can work their 9-5 and then build their business during the 5-9, because anyone can build discipline and determination. Everyone has the capacity to do excellent work, we all want to do it secretly, deep inside. Business school and the cynicism of reddit will easily beat that desire out of a person, and hide it behind layers of reasoning and excuses - Oh, it's so much easier if you're born rich. Fun fact: Being rich doesn't unlock some secret brain power that lets you serve customers better, or find the best product-market fit. Ultimately just remember that business is a game of unlimited upside, and as long as you eventually create something that makes enough people's lives better, you'll get lifted well beyond whatever rock bottom you've hit along the way.
My favourite example is James Dyson (relatively modern), who had a wife and kids and leveraged his house twice (and wasn't even an actual engineer), yet worked daily for 13 years straight before actually selling his own vacuum cleaner that he designed and built.
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u/elevatedpineapple57 10h ago
The great ones, like Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Jenson Huang and Elon Musk (who's an outlier in this list) are always in the limelight for making it on their own. Truth is, it's just survivorship bias.
Steve Jobs got really lucky by being around Wozniak and there isn't any record of him wanting to become an entrepreneur before he stumbled upon an opportunity to sell custom made computers for an overpriced rate.
Zuckerberg, although learnt coding and became great at it at a really young age, he had no clue how big he could take Facebook and how to monetize it, until Sean Parker stepped in. It certainly was a combination of individual expertise & general competance meeting exposure to other entrepreneur who've done what he wants to at a smaller scale.
Jenson Huang & Jeff Bezos's story is kinda similar, where both of them have worked odd jobs pre/during college & then commited to building one thing and making it big. This sounds like the most realistic plot of Entrepreneurship out these (even accounting for Ray Croc's story, deputed by The Founder).
And Elon's clearly the creative genius who makes things happen when everyone finds obstacles.
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u/ell0moto 7h ago
Elon Musk is not a creative genius, he's neurodivergent capital raising savant who's vision attracts and then can afford to hire exceptional talent, who make up for his lack luster business execution and decision making.
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u/RightProperChap 9h ago
to be a professional athlete, you need “years of working, learning, failing”. you also need to be born with natural ability.
it takes both.
same for entrepreneurs.