On America’s west
coast there are examples of what the popularization of entrepreneurship could
look like at the regional and company-level.
Silicon Valley
continues to attract more venture capital and to create more wealth than any country in the world. The folks in the
Bay Area have created an entrepreneurial economy.
Further north in
Seattle, Jeff Bezos has created an entrepreneurial company.
Jeff Bezos recently
emerged as the world’s richest man and is the world’s only triple-digit
billionaire. Bezos is an entrepreneur. He has also created a platform that has
popularized entrepreneurship. Not only does Amazon have more than 500,000
employees, it has "2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, [and]
millions of Amazon Web Services developers.” And, Bezos reports, "In 2017,
for the first time in history, more than half of units sold on Amazon worldwide
were from third-party sellers."[1]
Bezos isn’t doing all the entrepreneurial lifting at Amazon; he’s got millions
of co-entrepreneurs and the result is that as they struggle to become rich they
inevitably increase his net worth. People who create, make or ship products hope
to get rich by selling through Amazon. Jeff Bezos is just one of the millions
of entrepreneurs who use the platform that his team has built.
Knowledge workers
turn raw data into knowledge in the same way that factories turn raw materials
into products. A computer makes knowledge work far easier and during the 1980s and 1990s,
the personal computer became ubiquitous as knowledge work evolved and became
more common. Microsoft provided the PC’s operating system and software like
Word, Outlook, and Excel and for Microsoft it was like having a patent on forks
and spoons when people stopped eating with their hands.
In 1995, Bill
Gates became the world’s richest man by creating tools that enabled knowledge
workers to do their work. In 2018, Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man by
creating tools that enabled entrepreneurs to do their work. From the last couple
of decades in the 20th century to the first couple of the 21st
century, the source of new wealth was shifting from making knowledge work
easier to making entrepreneurship easier.
Sometimes what is
most obvious deserves the closest scrutiny. A region that has created record
amounts of wealth. The world’s richest men? Those might just hold clues as to how
the economy is changing. Successful economic policies in this century will
popularize entrepreneurship.
Three categories
of successful 21st century economic policies will be “follow the lead of
Silicon Valley,” create an entrepreneurial track in education, and make it
easier for employees to act - and be rewarded - like entrepreneurs
