LTYE #2 | Learn Entrepreneurship

Dear B.,

In your kind email, you ask if I (or if someone else) can teach you entrepreneurship.

That is a very nice request, but that forces me to a lot of humility.

I’m lucky to give an entrepreneurship class at several engineering schools, and I used to start my firt course with the following :

“I can’t teach you entrepreneurship. However, you can learn it”.

All right, it sound like I’m deviating any responsability to put it squarely on those who are listening to me.

And still, that’s pretty much how it is : entrepreneurship is not just a “subject matter”, that could be conveyed like biology or calculus. It is a set of attitudes, experiences, actions (and counter-actions), that can hardly (or not at all) lend itself to being captured in lesson notes.

So anyone who dare to call him- or herself a “teacher of entrepreneurship” should be very modest. Still, it can indeed be learned : it is more of a challenge for the budding entrepreneur, her learning track, that can be enriched in various ways, from books to experience sharing, to experimentation, etc.

Of course, there is still some “material” : a corpus of useful concepts to launch a startup.

Entrepreneurship can be thaught ? Sure. But it holds in a few hours.

Mostly, entrepreneurship can be learned. By actually starting, and by listening : to your peers, your mentors, but mainly to your first customers.

Have a safe journey !

R.