Quote:
Originally Posted by rand
I think a fair answer to your question is there three main things to be aware of:
1. intelligence
2. education
3. experience
I think its possible to "succeed" with a good amount of any two of the three. Take Google, I am pretty sure the founders had like 0 experience (so 1,2).
Take Amazon, I think Bezos only had an undergraduate degree (so1,3). He did some Wall Street thing for a while.
I would imagine in most cases intelligence is a common factor.
Hope that answers your question.
I tried to find a "proper" academic paper on this subject. Didn't find anything though. It would be interesting to know the correlation between successful entrepreneurship and years of experience, educational attainment, IQ and controlling for external variables but that sort of study would be very hard to do. I think I agree with you, above everything else intelligence is the most important factor followed by hard work.
Did some investigation and there are a couple of well known business guys with practically no education, experience and network that made it work. Richard Branson is a prime example, started his business at 16.
I wasn't looking for extreme exceptions, obviously those statistical outliers exist but I also looked up unknown guys with relatively successful businesses. Apparently it wasn't as uncommon as I thought it was.
In fact, I found the owner of a website that is doing a very similar business that I'm doing so the blueprint is there. I did some linkedin stalking and he's basically been running businesses since he was of legal age. Also found others like him in other industries who started their business at age 16-18 and had great success. I guess employee or intern experience is definitely not a must. In my case I'm starting a relatively low cost business, I'm mainly investing time.
(I obviously don't count working a summer job or 2 months flipping burgers as experience.)