Against Entrepreneurship

I have the wrong idea about what entrepreneurship is.

I must blame my grandfather. An austere man, he built a business by working hard, paying his taxes and keeping his word. He created something. He made money, invested in blue chip stocks and lived within his means. He would turn down opportunities, much to my uncle's disappointment, if he thought he couldn't service the contract. The first English sentence I learnt - from him - is 'Cut your coat according to your cloth'.

Growing up, I had plenty of disagreements with him. Most of it was political. He never voted, which enraged me. His reason was simple: In India, once one votes, a mark of indelible ink used to be put on one's index finger. He hated that and objected to the implicit lack of trust this implied. He also told me that Gandhi destroyed the country by teaching people to disobey the laws, which did not go down well with the revolutionary sympathies of a twenty-year old.

However, I watched him run the business and adored his way of doing things. He would walk away from contracts if bribes were asked for. He would always pay the employees and suppliers on time, putting them ahead of himself. When he would come home in the evening, he would retreat to his library to read his books or play his organ. I knew I wanted to be like him, despite the oddity of his political views.

I grew up in West Bengal in the 1980s. Politics was everywhere around me. All my friends and teachers were political; college was political; workplace was political. And, I was political too, conversant as I was with my Gramsci and Camus. But I never saw politics as a vocation, never joined any marches, never even attended a political event. Instead, I put my faith in business - I wanted to change the world by being an entrepreneur.

In this, I realise I missed one big lesson from my grandfather. He was a realist; he knew most businesses are speculations and therefore, he limited his ambitions. He did something boring, supplied rubber knifes which tyre companies used. Perhaps he believed that businesses can't change the world. 

Now that I am surrounded by businesspeople, I see it more clearly. Almost everyone is a speculator. They don't mean a word they say. They see a lazy life as a sign of success, the opposite of what my grandfather would have thought. 'Fake it till you make it' mantra would have horrified him: A businessman in his world was supposed to be a man of his word. 

I don't know whether I got the idea of entrepreneurship wrong, or if I am just looking at the wrong crowd. Perhaps, the truth is somewhat in-between: Entrepreneurship is not a fixed concept, and this has changed with time. Today's entrepreneurship is different, given that most talk I hear are about valuations rather than what the business does. If OpenAI can't have revenues amounting to one-thousandth time of its valuation, you know something is wrong. But you won't say it out loud because everyone is a speculator. 

Therefore, I am in a bind: After a lifetime of trying to create new stuff and always taking risks, I am confronted with the realisation that my ideas about entrepreneurship are just quaint. I am now searching for a boring way out: Do something simple, local and predictable! Just as I tell my friends that decency is an act of courage, it seems being a non-entrepreneur is now a novel thing. If I really want to change the world, I should not be an entrepreneur.