Business Opportunities Weblog

November 5, 2005 by Dane Carlson | 4 Comments

Because everyone loves lists, Inc. has put together a list of 75 reasons to be glad you’re an entrepreneur right now. Some of the really good ones:

• Because English is, more than ever, the language of international business. There are more Chinese learning English than Americans speaking it.
• Peer groups. More of them. Less formal. Simpler to start (not least because there are simply more peers). The counsel, empathy, and bracing inspiration of veteran fellow travelers can be as close as you decide to arrange it. (Shall we say the local diner, second Tuesday every month?)
• Because not just your business problems but our social problems, too, are being attacked more and more frequently with entrepreneurship.
  Because big companies still keep Dilbert in fresh material.
• Angels. More of them. More like you. In 2005 there are 225,000 active angel investors, putting $22.5 billion in play (up from $18.1 billion in 2003). In 1996 there were 10 formal angel investment groups; today, at least 200.
• eBay–which has provided millions of people with a real-time, honest-money correspondence course in market economics. (And made it fun.)
• Because entrepreneurship is a way out, a way through. In processing interviews in New York City Family Court, kids still say they want most to be NBA basketball players–but the second most commonly stated goal is “to be an entrepreneur.”
• Because in every decade you could differentiate and build a business by running an organization in strange new ways, unleashing yourself and your people by sharing equity or opening the books, or putting authority in the lowest hands, or experimenting with heroically unconventional environments, or leveraging teams, networks, and alternative workstyles, or by embracing any of a hundred other managerial strategies of unexpected provenance. And big-company managers, unlike you, still can’t.

In Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Tags: Entrepreneurial Lifestyle