Ep. 17: John Chisholm on the Decline of Entrepreneurship as a Stranded Technology and How to Unleash Your Inner Company

Niklas speaks with Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur John Chisholm.

Over the last 35 years, John has founded, grown, or sold four companies in Silicon Valley, including Decisive Technology, now part of Google; and CustomerSat, now part of FocusVision. He has served as president and chair of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association, and as trustee of MIT and the Santa Fe Institute. Today, John is CEO of John Chisholm Ventures, a startup advisory, and angel investment firm. He is the author of “Unleash Your Inner Company: 10 Steps to Discover, Launch, and Scale Your Ideal Business.”

Among much else, Niklas & John explore the thesis of entrepreneurship as a stranded technology. Technology can be stranded by failing to attract sufficient investment to compete, such as automobiles propelled by steam as compared to internal combustion engines in the early 20th century; or by being superseded by other technologies, such as fax has been replaced by email and messaging; or by regulation, such as nuclear energy today.

Similarly, entrepreneurship is increasingly being stranded. Across the United States, entrepreneurship is on the decline. According to the Kauffman Foundation, as a percentage of all businesses, new firms have dropped from 16% in 1977 to fewer than 8% in 2010. This encompasses all new businesses – sole proprietorships, retail stores, service providers, restaurants, consultants – not just high-tech.

In this session with John Chisholm, we’ll see how a combination of factors, both external & regulatory, on the one hand, and internal & psychological on the other, is holding back entrepreneurs today. John offers recommendations both for aspiring entrepreneurs on how to discover, launch and scale a business ideal for them, and also for lawmakers and regulators on how to make their jurisdictions more economically resilient, humane, and friendly to startups and innovation, via such techniques as localism, sunset clauses, and special economic zones.

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