StillSecure, After All These Years: Were entrepreneurs born yesterday?

It is not often that I disagree with my friend Brad Feld. It is not because he is on the Board of Directors at StillSecure, but more that Brad and I generally agree on a lot of topics and where we don't, he makes his position reasonable enough that I can appreciate his point of view. But today I have to disagree with Brad. Brad wrote an article about his annual trip with his family back to the 'hood in the Bronx where his Dad and Uncle grew up in the 40's and 50's. While on the trip Brad's uncle made the comment "if you aren't growing, your dying". I actually agree with the statement. Brad than talks about the world being different today than the world his dad and uncle grew up in. He makes the statement, "Entrepreneurship existed, but it wasn’t the mainstream". Therein lies my problem.

Brad has quite a record of success as both an entrepreneur and as a VC. But I think Brad is mixing and matching them here. Yes the VC industry may not have been mainstream in the days of his dad and uncle growing up, but entrepreneurs were very much alive, growing and mainstream at the time. In fact the entrepreneurial tradition is a key part of American tradition. In fact some people think this tradition is our greatest export. Just because there may not have been a VC around to help the entrepreneur doesn't mean that there were not mainstream successful entrepreneurs. From Benjamin Franklin himself, who started a bunch of different businesses around his inventions and a successful printing business to Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, the American tradition of innovation has made many a fortune over the course of our history. From John Rockefeller to JP Morgan, from Andrew Carnegie to Henry Ford, America has a rich tradition of entrepreneurs being successful on Main St, Wall St and every street in between. These men did it the old fashioned way, they boot strapped it! They didn't have the luxury of finding some VCs to give them capital and put them in the Kiretsu. If they took money, they paid an arm and a leg for it (hey, some things never change).

So Brad lets not imagine that entrepreneurs being mainstream was non-existent before the advent of the VC industry or the technology revolution. It was American entrepreneurship that allowed Brad's dad to join the armed forces, go to medical school and establish and grow a successful medical practice. Americans like Brad's dad, Stan and his uncle Charlie have been been building businesses like that since the birth of the nation and even before. Without VCs and without computers, these entrepreneurs were indeed growing or they were dying.

But to be so era-centric as to not acknowledge the long and successful tradition of American entrepreneurship is to ignore the facts and insult the long line of business people who have made this country great!