Everyone is an entrepreneur, according to Mike Malone
May 7th, 2008 Posted in BlogLast night PRx Communication Strategists invited several community leaders to hear Michael S. Malone’s speech on “The Significance of the Entrepreneur in American History” at Santa Clara University. We were happy to host Carmen and Larry Stone, the County Assessor; Tom Zazueta, head honcho of our competitor Coakley Heagerty; Jerry Silva, Auditor for Green Waste; Sue Hutchison late of the Mercury News; Rick Zirpolo of Rabbit Office Automation; and Jerry Mikolajczyk, the sapphire king of Madagascar.
Michael is an old friend of PRx. We’ve worked with him on projects for Applied Materials, Apple and other clients and promoted his book “Valley of the Heart’s Delight.” Last night, Mike spoke about his thesis that there were more than 300 million entrepreneurs in the US at this time. He linked broadband access to entrepreneurialism, saying that a high school dropout playing video games online made him an entrepreneur.
Clearly, he was waving the red cape in front of the bull. I asked what about the Rust Belt regions of Detroit and Pittsburgh? The people we see demonstrating there for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama don’t look very much like the sleek, hip venture capitalists who populate Sand Hill Road. They don’t look like the hordes of 1999 Harvard MBAs who migrated here to start Web sites for tweens or pet owners or people who wanted to buy unused concert tickets. Mike didn’t really answer my question, but he implied that broadband access would spur the creation of new companies and new business models.
OK, Mike. We love you and are happy for your investment acumen and your success at real estate speculation in Oregon. But this argument doesn’t hold water. Millions of Americans, especially in the middle of the country, not in Silicon Valley or in the biotech cradle of South San Francisco, have no idea of how to start a company or to envision a new way of delivering healthcare or booking vacations online.
Mike is eminently quotable, and his calling out the year 1969—which saw the creation of the Internet, the invention of the microprocessor and the first landing of a human on the moon—as a watershed year for transformation was both logical and appreciated by the crowd.
However, Mike neglected the underclasses in his assessment of the state of entrepreneurialism in the US. And the thesis that entrepreneurialism is a class thing didn’t even raise its ugly head in his talk. A 10th grade dropout in Alabama playing Grand Theft Auto IV is not producing anything, not making any new insights into how to shape the social fabric through technology or even seeing a new outlet for game addicts. The passivity of the majority of American technology consumers is a fact of life, and Mike Malone is one of the most gifted thinkers we have who can put that passivity into some social and economic context.
Mike, if broadband access can not automatically create 300 million entrepreneurs, how do we mobilize the energies, thoughts and aspirations of the millions of high school dropouts who think that playing games online or downloading songs is the epitome of Web usage?
One question that burned especially brightly for me during Mike’s talk was where are the entrepreneurs and creative thinkers who will come up with a solution to the healthcare crisis, where 47 million people in the US don’t have health insurance and many of them fall into bankruptcy because of a major illness or accident. Is there a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates who will make access to healthcare a common and affordable thing in the US? Is there a Facebook or Google out there that will ensure that every American can get the healthcare he or she needs at a price that is affordable?
We’ll see. Mike, thank you for your enthusiasm and optimistic view of the world. But don’t let your deep, daily experience of speaking with entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley color your assessment of what really happens in the fly-over states. Things are grimmer than they seem here in the West Coast Paradise. We’re the ones who set the pace and show the way, so Mike, how do we light a fire under millions of Web addicts who have little ambition and less motivation to make a lasting contribution to human aspirations?
