Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his\u00a0recent talk Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I\u2019ve got news for you: you\u2019ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren\u2019t born, they\u2019re made. And they aren\u2019t anything like you think they are. My team\u00a0surveyed We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business \u2014 just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn\u2019t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.<\/p>\n There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were \u201cextremely interested\u201d in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).<\/p>\n What did affect their successes?\u00a0 Education \u2014 but not the college they graduate from. In a different\u00a0study The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the\u00a0Kauffman Foundation One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year,\u00a0less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth \u201cscale\u201d\u00a0businesses. These\u00a0new firms, especially the \u201cscale\u201d firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1\/3 of GDP growth since then.\u00a0So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of\u00a0successful high-growth startups.\u00a0 After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of\u00a0our firms.<\/p>\n That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion\u00a0endowment Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note\u00a0this The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, \u201cVenture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition\u201d. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in myprevious<\/a> posts<\/a>, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population \u2013 a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note:<\/strong> Guest writer\u00a0Vivek Wadhwa The above content here was copied from below link<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i.ixnp.com\/images\/v6.21\/t.gif\")
<\/a> to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs.\u00a0Wilson wrote<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a> 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn\u2019t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn\u2019t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.<\/p>\n<\/a> founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)<\/p>\n<\/a>of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn\u2019t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.<\/p>\n<\/a>has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at \u201cteachable moments\u201d \u2014 when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn\u2019t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.\u00a0 That\u2019s why Kauffman created a program called\u00a0Fast Trac<\/a>, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.<\/p>\n<\/a>) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called\u00a0Kauffman Labs<\/a>. \u00a0This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program\u00a0is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with \u201cscalable ideas\u201d can be\u00a0recruited to be entrepreneurs<\/em>and to be made successful, by surrounding them with\u00a0a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a\u00a0Y Combinator<\/a> on steroids.<\/p>\n<\/a> BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also\u00a0blogged<\/a> about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don\u2019t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path \u2014 which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.<\/p>\n<\/a> is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at\u00a0@vwadhwa<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n