5 myths of entrepreneurship

Myth 1: Uncertainty is bad for entrepreneurship

As economist Frank Knight showed over a century ago, where the risks are measurable, you can buy and sell that risk in the market; hence, you get the market rate of return in such conditions. But most things in life involve unmeasurable risk, and it is only in such circumstances that you can expect to make a profit.

Myth 2: Evidence-based decision-making is a sufficient basis for business

Evidence-based decision-making has utility when you have utter confidence that the future is going to be exactly like the past. But because the world is constantly evolving, whatever model you had for how the economy worked yesterday is not the correct model for how it will work tomorrow. To make a reasonable judgement about this, you must use your imagination and blend evidence with creativity.

Myth 3: Large companies can function like individual entrepreneurs

The raison d’être of big corporations is typically to undertake projects of large scale and complexity, where the stakes are high. That means you need a process that is much stricter than in an entrepreneurial organization. (This explains the paradox whereby once startups become a certain size, they hire people from large companies precisely because they want to bring in the processes that large companies have to scale.)

Myth 4: Entrepreneurship today is about the rapid implementation of AI

Apple’s approach to AI is giving the lie to this fallacy. Many experts question Apple’s strategy because they think it has “fallen behind on its AI applications.” In fact, Apple is waiting to see which AI use cases make sense for its product lines, business, and customers. Once these are known, it will move at full force and maximum speed and deliver extreme value in the way that has proved so successful for the company in the past.

Myth 5: Entrepreneurship is about heroic leaps forward

Rather than overnight successes resulting from one individual’s breakthrough, great advances in innovation are made through many small steps. The creation of the World Wide Web is a good example. Sir Tim Berners-Lee is credited with its invention, but in practice, an army of people across a very large number of companies of all sizes, most of whom are unknown, brought the Internet into being.