Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America

by Andrew Yang

Entrepreneurship is a process. You get better over time. The image of the college dropout entrepreneur who starts a world-class company is misleading. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are highly visible outliers. Most twenty- to twenty-two-year-olds don’t have the wherewithal to start or run a successful business at that young age, and this should be unsurprising, given that a majority of businesses fail within the first several years, regardless of the age of the founder. Most successful entrepreneurs failed once or twice when they were young. Before founding Microsoft, Bill Gates cofounded a company called Traf-O-Data that lost thousands of dollars and shut down.4 Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban recalls “coming home and having the lights turned off because [I] couldn’t afford to pay the bills” when he was starting out.5 Sam Walton’s first Arkansas store went under before he started Walmart, and Henry Ford’s first car company went out of business. Entrepreneurs are themselves forged through experience. You wouldn’t expect a doctor or athlete to be the best in his or her first several years, either. The key is to get the failures and lessons in as soon as possible so that you can learn from them, get up, and recover.