"We have lived through the age of big industry and the age of the giant corporation. But I believe that this is the age of the entrepreneur." -- Ronald Reagan
It was only last March that President Reagan, speaking to a Wall Street crowd, made his pronouncement about the age of the entrepreneur. Like most official charistenings, it came a little late: Entrepreneurship has been a buzzword of choice for a few years. Giant corporations, bureaucracies atremble, have proclaimed their born-again entrepreneurial souls. Pundits and professors have reported and dissected the new age's Horatio Alger tales -- beginning in a garage and ending, thanks to luck and pluck, in an initial public offering.
Out beyond the cliche and hype, however, it is hard to escape the conclusion that something real is taking place. The numbers alone tell a compelling story. In 1980, according to Dun & Bradstreet Corp., 533,520 new businesses incorporated in the United States. By 1984, the figure was up to a record-breaking 634,991, with 1,748,584 in the intervening three years. Even when the paper corporations and the quick failures are weeded out, the trend is unmistakable. Along with the new businesses have come new jobs -- more than 20 million in 10 years, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher David Birch's well-massaged figures -- and new products, indeed whole new industries. Ten years ago, who would have known what to make of a new company whose chief product was, say, CMOS electrically erasable memory chips? Who would have imagined franchised legal-services clinics or a host of feisty new regional airlines?
For three months this year, as winter turned to spring, I traveled across the United States, tape recorder in hand, asking people what they thought about this age of the entrepreneur. I went wherever curiosity led me, on the road from New York to Los Angeles, from Anchorage to Miami. I stopped in Amarillo, Tex.; in Wausau, Wis.; in Boulder, Colo.; and Sterling, Ill. -- and in many, many places in between. The people I talked with were not, I confess, a wholly random sample. I wanted to hear what the chief executive officer of IBM Corp. thought about the entrepreneurial revival. (A busy man, John Akers provided me with a few remarks taped earlier, as did William Hewlett and David Packard, the founders of Hewlett Packard Co.) I wanted to visit oil raider T. Boone Pickens, and to talk with the telephone operator at Apple Computer Inc. I wanted to see what was becoming of the South Side of Chicago, where the smokestacks have been stilled, as well as Silicon Valley. I wondered if Mary Kay Ash, who started her $277.5-million cosmetics giant in 1963, thought it was easier for a woman to start her own business today. I wanted to meet a man who had bet his life savings on a franchise of the now-bankrupt Pizza Time Theatres Inc. restaurant chain, once home of Chuck E. Cheese.
I wanted to listen. Not to analyze, and not to quantify. I hoped, through the voices of the men and women involved, to capture a portrait of the current entrepreneurial moment. I say current, because entrepreneurship is nothing new. It is as American as W. K. Kellogg's original Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Co., or the once-struggling Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which a man named Thomas Watson Sr. renamed International Business Machines. It is as familiar as Henry Ford's automobiles or Ray Kroc's hamburger stands -- the rights to which Kroc bought from Maurice and Richard McDonald for $2.7 million almost 25 years ago. In the 1890s, and again in the 1920s, there was the same explosion in start-ups, in new technologies, and in new products that we are seeing today. The fractional-horsepower electric motor was as radical a technology in its day as the micro-processor, and Ford's assembly line at Highland Park, Mich., as novel an organizing principle as any hightech skunkworks along Massachusetts Route 128.
But the current entrepreneurial boom is different, too. It is bigger. And the players have changed. They are still the tinkerers, the malcontents, the dreamers with good ideas and the stubbornness to see them through. These days, however, an entrepreneur is likely to have a business-school education or a big-corporation track record that would have been unheard of in the past. There is a good chance, too, that the founder of the business down the street isn't white -- and that she wasn't born in the United States.
The first part of my chronicle is simply a sampling of these entrepreneurial stories, along with some thoughts from the experts on how durable -- and how widespread -- the phenomenon may be. From there the questions grow more complex. Is the entrepreneurial revival only, or mainly, a creature of technology, an offspring of the digital computer -- and is Silicon Valley, warts and all, a vision of tomorrow's America? Or is it something hardier, a trend that reflects people's search for an independent life and livelihood beyond the world of big organizations? To what extent is entrepreneurship an answer to the dramatic dislocations of today's economy? What is its promise?
Such questions are grandiose, and the fact that the following sections address them doesn't mean I have answers. Most of the entrepreneurs I met, in any case, were too busy trying to build something to think of themselves as part of a larger phenomenon, let alone as creators of an ill-defined new age.When they reflected, if they had time to reflect at all, they were more likely to marvel at the twists of fate that led them, almost by chance, to where they are today.
"Who can describe constant fear"? -- Michael Levy
Michael Levy publishes Texas Monthly magazine.
I went to a career counselor, and he gave me a No. 2 pencil and told me to fill out this questionnaire. They gave me two choices after evaluating the questionnaire: One was raising chickens, and the other was starting a magazine called Texas Monthly -- and I don't like chickens.
When I was asked to give a speech on being a young entrepreneur, I got up and said, "My name is Mike Levy and I'm 38 years old. I started Texas Monthly 12 years ago, when I was 26. And at that time, I was tall and had long, curly blond hair. Now I'm bald and two-and-a-half inches shorter."
A friend of mine who's a radio commentator in Dallas likes to say that people who remember the good old days have bad memories. Basically, he's right. I can remember starting Texas Monthly, but who can describe constant fear? The fear not just of economic loss, but the fear of failure. The biggest reason more people don't try to take that entrepreneurial risk is that they can't get over the hurdle of, "God, I might fail."
