Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made? | Hacker News Reader

Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made?

boss.blogs.nytimes.com

13 pointsobiefernandez26 comments

From what I've seen, some of each. Some people start with an advantage that, whether or not it's inborn, is pretty well established by 18. But training and encouragement seem to be able to multiply whatever level of ability people start with.

I'm quite interested in how many of you (self-employed types) have parents that were self-employed. My great grandad owned a tabacco factory in Cuba and my grandfather was an entertainer and writer. My dad had a variety of businesses from schlepping Encyclopedia Brittanica to real estate broker and my mom owned/operated a bridal gown shop. None of my parent's ventures were particularly succesful but they definitely had the drive.

Mother attempted to start a business twice / failed.

Aunt attempted to start a magazine / failed.

Grandmother ran her own hair salon / sold it.

Grandfather started and sold 2 gas stations, owns an auto-repair shop currently.

Grandfather was a pretty successful tailor.

The generation after that one son another tailor.

My father started a software company in 1990 and it just celebrated its 19th anniversary. Made it through some tough times, but he's doing very well. He's also not a programmer/technologist whatsoever, which I think really helped.

Now I've started my own software company. Having a successful parent definitely helps.

Self-employed: mother, father, both sisters, two uncles, aunt

Employed: aunt

Wow. I never tallied it up before! None of these I would consider especially entrepreneurial, but rather they make a living doing things they're interested in: photographer, horse trainer, marriage counselor, graphic artist, automated machinery manufacturer owner (builds big robots). I like to design and build software and that's what I employ myself doing. In my family, self-reliance and keeping yourself happy/engaged in your work are the guiding principles.

Neither of my parents was self-employed but my grandmother ran a successful business in London for many years. My grandfather on the other side ran a pub his entire life.

In his teens, my grandfather moved to the city and started as a delivery guy for a bakery. He was soon leading a team of delivery guys--kinda like a union leader. When the owner of a bakery was doing a poor job managing his bakery, he asked my grandfather to become the manager. Later my grandfather would end up buying that bakery along with buncha others.

There is a widespread feeling in our larger family that you can never make enough to feed your family by holding a regular job.

I very much doubt it. Trading which is the nearest to being an entrepreneur is very recent possibly just around the time of the Phoenicians or a bit earlier. Highly unlikely that this was adequate time for selective pressures to have any real effect on the human genome. In addition most of the time most of the profits from such trading went to the Kings and Nobles.

However, certain traits that define entrepreneurs are probably hereditary (risk taking, opportunity seeking etc..)

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-evolution11dec11,...

"In the last 5,000 to 10,000 years, as agriculture was able to support increasingly large societies, the rate of evolutionary change rose to more than 100 times historical levels, the study concluded."

"The tendency to be an entrepreneur and personality traits of extraversion..."

Extraversion is highly correlated to entrepreneurship?

I was wondering that too. I'm not extroverted, but highly entrepreneurial. Honestly, I'm not too big into new experiences, either. I just like solving problems and making money.

I think dyslexia is more strongly correlated to entrepreneurship: the proportion of dyslexics who are entrepreneurs is higher than in the general population, it's not clear that the proportion of extroverts is higher among entrepreneurs, there are many introverted entrepreneurs.

Julie Logan has done two studies that demonstrate a correlation between dyslexia (which is an inherited difference in brain structure) and entrepreneurship:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/business/worldbusiness/05i...

http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/media/stories/story_8_45816_44300...

Nuture nature.

everything is heritable, including that which controls our responses to nurture. Everything.

From a recently published research journal article announced on another thread on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534

Johnson, W., Turkheimer, E., Gottesman, I., and Bouchard, T. (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4. 217-220.

"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

(Alas, now the pay wall workaround for that article is no longer available. I have a complete copy of the article, obtained from one of the authors.) It is generally true that nearly all human behavioral characteristics show greater concordance among closely related individuals than among presumptively unrelated individuals (which is what "heritability," a pre-Mendelian concept, is about). This is not at all to say that young people couldn't be trained to be entrepreneurs, and thus made rather than born.

I think too they have not done clearly the research. Yes, some aspects of the behavior of a person are in the genetics, but it's more the environment that models it.

Eg. in my family we have a strong tendency to identify new business opportunities, but this doesn't mean it's 100% because of the DNA. It's more about about the environment (in my case family) type of culture and education.

Thanks for the name of the report. Can you send me a copy?

I think too they have not done clearly the research.

Who is "they"? Are you referring to the authors of the article I cited above,

ohnson, W., Turkheimer, E., Gottesman, I., and Bouchard, T. (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4. 217-220.

published in quite a respectable peer-reviewed journal? Anyone who follows this research should be familiar with the name of Thomas Bouchard,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Bouchard,_Jr.

who is one of the most eminent researchers on human behavioral genetics. Eric Turkheimer,

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/

another of the co-authors, should also be well known to anyone who has done research in this field at all. But, yes, this latest paper makes clear than even highly heritable traits are very subject to environmental influences, as the quoted paragraph above says.

P.S. I might be able to find another work-around for obtaining the full paper for persons who post full contact information in their HN profiles.

No, I was referring to nytimes.

Please, what information you need? (you have the email)

I suspect the parents and the children are taller. I don't see how two separate populations of people evolving different physical traits over time is evidence that that height is not inherited. Your quote says, "Presently differ." Three or four generations of people have been born since 1948 when they split.

Furthermore, the ability for dna to selectively turn on or off particular genes in response to environmental conditions is itself inherited from the parents. I'm sure there were, in our past, some mutants who did not have the ability to turn on or off genes and perhaps they died.

It's easier to train monkeys to fear a stick than to fear a flower. It's because the genes allow it. Sticks look like snakes. If it's easier to learn to fear a snake, the monkey survives longer.

I don't see how two separate populations of people evolving different physical traits over time is evidence that that height is not inherited.

The quotation is about expression of a trait (phenotype) and not about genotype, and thus not about "evolving different physical traits." There is no evidence that gene frequencies have changed at all in either place.

I'm still not convinced. If it's 90% heritable, then the average of the shortest population needs only be 5' tall. That's pretty short. Nutrition could account for the rest.

Yes, nutrition is environmental, but it doesn't change my original claim. Our physical ability to respond to environmental changes is inherited. If you feed someone who has inherited the genes from two 5' tall parents, I highly doubt you could feed one twin better than the other and get a 6" difference in height. You know by thinking about it that it won't happen.

Furthermore, 4 generations of offspring will lead to genetic differences in the population. Foxes can be domesticated in 10 generations. That's a huge divergence in phenotype.

I'm not sure I follow you there.

Lots of things are heritable, we have tons of proof for that. But everything ? You've just thrown out the possibility for anybody to overcome their genetic pre-disposition and to surpass their endowment.

Gattaca is a movie around that whole theme.

Sure you inherit a whole bunch of stuff from your parents, but your mental make-up is in large part due to how you are brought up and how much effort you put in to making something from that which you were given.

If 'success' were heritable then all the successful businesspeople would have successful children, they should, especially given that they have daddy/mommy as a jump off point.

The opposite is just as likely though.

Family fortunes are usually cyclic:

- one generation works very hard, creates a base

- the next one runs with it, makes a fortune

- the one after that has it easy, doesn't do much, but has lots of money

- the one after that squanders the remainder

It's very rare to see a family continue to be successful in an unbroken line given the freedom of choice to perform or to be lazy.

People choose their behavior. You can be born with gifts and choose not to use them.

I do not deny that practice makes perfect, but the amount practice benefits the individual is largely due to the genes that power them. All things being equal, the one with successful entrepreneurial parents will be more successful than one without entrepreneurial parents.

That does not mean that someone without entrepreneurial parents cannot be a successful entrepreneur. The behavior is a choice. Someone with the inherited traits that may make them a successful entrepreneur may choose to be basketball player or doctor or computer scientist or mow lawns or clean houses.

I'm sorry but I don't buy that.

If I just look around me you could almost make the opposite argument. The kids of drunks and lowlifes score and the ones from 'well to do' families are doing drugs and pissing away their lives. Not all of them, of course, but a good portion at least.

A very high percentage of kids tend to revolt against parents by choosing paths in life that are the opposite of theirs.

I don't see how what you are saying there is at all reasonable. These are kids. They aren't adults and haven't had the opportunity to be successful or fail yet.

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