This article first appeared in Inc.
Capitalism has a good leg for me. After serving in the military duration of Vietnam, I got home and had a race in eight startups. I retired when I was 45 years old. During the last quarter of the century, in my third career, I helped create the methods used by entrepreneurs to build new new companies, while teaching 1,000 or students how to start new companies. It has been gratifying to see that technological entrepreneurship becomes an integral part of the economy and technology companies become some of the most valued companies in the world.
What has made this happen is the relentless cycle of innovation and creative destruction of the old industries promoted by new startups with new technologies and new business models (network television replaced by transmission services, GPU Nvidia versus Intel CPUS, electric cars versus the internal combustion engine, movie cameras versus smartphones, programmers versus ai), all fed by venture capital.
It makes me ask me: Are startups still based on people with passion for creating something new? Or has the motivation to the aquability of the largest cash battery changed?
When I was an entrepreneur, what lifted me in the morning was to build something incredible that people wanted to grab my hands and use. The idea that I could win a million of $ 1 or only $ 10 million on the road was always on the back of my head, but it was not for that reason I did.
I wonder if it is different for today’s entrepreneurs.
Here is a mental experiment: what happens if we said each new Entrepreneur who, regardless of how successful they were, their total compensation would be limited to $ 100 million.
How many aspiring entrepreneurs would they decide that it was not hemth starting a company? Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others would have given up before? Have you chosen other races?
How many would decide that it was not worth staying after your company was great and successful? (Would it be a bad thing?)
Would we get in, we would get less innovation? If so, why?
Would the best and brightest move to other countries?
Then we execute the same mental experiment with risk capitalists. Would other races choose? Invest less?
Would capitalism collapse at $ 100 million? Would we all be, the sky would prohibit, be “socialists” or worse, have this conversation?
Questions
I am curious about what you think.
Should there be any limit?
If so, why?
Or why not.
What would be the consequences?
Bass file: family/career/culture, risk capital |