What makes for a good entrepreneur in today’s start-up landscape? How do you work to scale and when is it right to go from bootstrapping to seeking funding? How are the roots of innovation now fundamentally different than the dot com era?
Lori Rosenkopf is a Professor of Management and also the Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, San Francisco campus. She is also the author of the book Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovation.
Greg and Lori discuss Lori’s focus on Wharton’s student and alumni entrepreneurial ecosystem, and she explains how entrepreneurship skills overlap with the innovation inside large organizations and universities. Lori describes seven entrepreneurial pathways and six “Rs” that reflect an entrepreneurial mindset, emphasizing that many successful entrepreneurs first build industry experience in standard careers rather than launching ventures immediately after school.
Their conversation covers how Wharton’s curriculum has evolved over time, adding majors and coursework in entrepreneurship, innovation, analytics, and now AI; experiential learning; venture pitching for credit. Greg asks how the Venture Acceleration Lab helps expose students to scaling alumni ventures. Lori and Greg discuss different stereotypes of entrepreneurs, and Lori touches on why alumni and industry-affiliation networks remain powerful, how innovation increasingly happens through ecosystems, partnerships, and acquisitions rather than in-house R&D, and the continuing importance of universities in basic science commercialization, including Penn’s Pennovation initiative and strong biomedical startup activity.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
The stereotype of a unicorn founder
17:18: I think that we have grown accustomed to a stereotype, which is, let us name them out, college dropout. Young. Venture capital backed tech, unicorn, great personal and commercial wealth. And now we are depending on them for philanthropy. We can have a whole discussion just about whether that is a good thing or not. But that is sort of the image.
Is there a way people can cultivate their resilience?
32:00: Resilience, it can come from being in love with your problem and wanting to solve that so deeply. Now it has to be a problem that enough of the marketplace shares that they are willing to think about your solution. But people who want to solve a problem are going to claim lots and lots of different ways to attack it. And this is what entrepreneurs are constantly dealing with, negative feedback and challenges. In many cases, it is very rare that companies of ventures first offering is something that everybody falls in love with.
What has Lori learned about information diffusion over 30 years of research?
11:17: I think that as we have gone to where more digital products and services, that it gives us the opportunity to build up these bigger ecosystems where different parties are collaborating in a variety. So it might be as extreme as acquisitions. And that is not just happening when Apple, that is CPG companies are buying little startups where people have developed new grants that are cool. They are partnering in many cases, so they may not be a full on acquisition, but there will be a contractual set of arrangements and maybe a conformance to a standard, as well. So that has become more and more common, and the idea that any one firm can invent everything in house, I think it does feel a little bit passé, you know, like rate of change is getting quicker and quicker.
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unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc 