Myth of the garage?

[sam22]

In this Fast Company article and their The Myth of the Garage collection (PDF, Kindle edition), authors Dan and Chip Heath argue that many entrepreneurs are "departed organization men" and not simply a random collection of people who want to start a company. Here's an excerpt:

Tales of groundbreaking innovation sound a lot alike. Like action-adventure movies, they have a predictable structure. You know how Die Hard 4 is going to end and you know how YouTube began: Some ordinary guys, without money or power, triumph via a brilliant insight and scrappy groundwork, just like Hewlett and Packard, who started in their garage. Or Jobs and Woz, who founded Apple in another garage. Or Michael Dell, who lived the same tale but upgraded to a dorm room. All rebels who triumphed over Big Business.

But what if those stories mislead us about what it takes to generate great ideas? Two researchers from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Pino Audia and Chris Rider, have debunked the Myth of the Garage in a recent paper. The garage, they say, "evokes the image of the lone individual who relies primarily on his or her extraordinary efforts and talent" to triumph. The reality is that successful founders are usually "organizational products." A separate study of VC-backed companies found that 91% were related to the founders' prior job experience. Audia and Rider say entrepreneurial triumphs aren't due to lonely, iconoclastic work--they're "eminently social." Wait a minute: Entrepreneurs aren't rebels, then, so much as recently departed organization men.

Consider two of the founders of YouTube, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Both cut their teeth at PayPal--in fact, Hurley was one of PayPal's first employees and even designed its logo. (He is also the son-in-law of James Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics.) Top-tier venture-capital firms were calling them, offering money, counsel, and connections, within months of launch. That's not quite as uplifting as hearing that twentysomething buddies created a cool site to swap videos with friends.

I've also heard Mark Cuban talk about a job as place where you are paid to learn.

Of course, I'm not saying we should live in the slow lane. But is there a place/are there benefits to having a non-entry-level job for a year or two before starting your first company? What are your thoughts?

 

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[JEdwards]

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