PART 1
GETTING STARTED
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
Thousands of business ventures are started every year. Most fail within a short period. Of those that survive, most achieve only meager success, some achieve rates of return high enough to justify the initial investment, and a few achieve phenomenal success. What distinguishes the successes from the failures? There is not just one answer. A new venture based on a good idea can fail because of poor implementation or bad luck. One that is based on a bad idea can fail despite excellent implementation. Many that survive but do not thrive should never have been undertaken. Sometimes, even when a venture is hugely successful, early financing mistakes limit the entrepreneurâs ability to share in the rewards.
This is a book on financial decision making for new ventures. In it, we provide the fundamentals for thinking analytically about whether an opportunity is worth pursuing and about how to apply the tools of financial economic theory to enhance the expected value of the undertaking. Corporate ventures and social ventures face similar challenges to those faced by stand-alone, for-profit ventures. Where there are important differences, we discuss the application of these tools to corporate venturing and social venturing.
1.1 Entrepreneurship and the Entrepreneur
The term âentrepreneurâ is of French origin. Its literal translation is simply âundertaker,â in the sense of one who undertakes to do some-thing. In the early 1700s, the English banker Richard Cantillon coined the use of the word in a managerial context. He emphasized the notion of the entrepreneur as a bearer of risk, particularly with respect to provision of capital. This early usage, however, does not adequately characterize our current understanding of what it means to be an entrepreneur. Clearly, risk bearing is an aspect of entrepreneurship, but risk is also borne by capital providers who may have no involvement in managing the venture and by employees who may have no financial capital invested.
In the early 1800s, the French economist J. B. Say described the entrepreneur as a person who seeks to shift economic resources from areas of low to areas of high productivity. Although Sayâs notion points us in a useful direction, it is too general. Most purposeful human activity can be described as shifting economic resources to higher-valued uses (or at least attempting to do so).1
The contributions of Cantillon and Say gained renewed attention in the early 1900s through the writings of two other economists. Joseph Schumpeter (1912) viewed the entrepreneur as actively seeking opportunities to innovate. In his view, the entrepreneur is the driver of economic progress, continually seeking to disturb the status quo in a quest for profits from deliberate and risky efforts to combine societyâs resources in new and valuable ways. In contrast, Frank Knight (1921) conceived of the entrepreneur as a manager of uncertainty and the entrepreneurial function as one of directing resources in the presence of uncertainty (and realizing a reward for performing successfully). Uncertainty, in Knightâs view, is an unavoidable aspect of the ordering of economic activity.2
Current use of the term âentrepreneurshipâ derives from these views and from more recent thinking by management scholars such as Peter Drucker. Drucker, who was a personal friend of Schumpeter, describes entrepreneurs as individuals who âcreate something new, something different; they change or transmute valuesâ (Drucker [1985], p. 20). Today, entrepreneurship is most often described as the pursuit of opportunities to combine and redeploy resources, without regard to current ownership or control of the resources. This notion clearly draws on the definition offered by Schumpeter but adds structure by recognizing that the entrepreneur is not constrained by current control of resources.
Thinking of entrepreneurship in this way suggests a multidimensional process. The entrepreneur must do the following:
1. Perceive an opportunity to create value by redeploying societyâs resources
2. Devise a strategy for marshaling control of the necessary resources
3. Implement a plan of action to bring about the change
4. Harvest the rewards that accrue from the innovation
This definition is broad enough to encompass entrepreneurship that arises in the for-profit sector, including extant corporations, as well as in the not-for-profit sector, including in universities and charitable foundations.
Survival and Failure Rates of New Businesses
The sequence of actions just outlined seems to suggest that successful innovation necessarily yields a reward. This, of course, is far from true. To be successful, an entrepreneur needs to maintain a clear focus on how strategic choices and implementation decisions are likely to affect rewards.
Figure 1.1 shows the survival rates of new ventures from a US Census Bureau longitudinal study of business ventures that were launched in 1992 and tracked through 2002, as well as a subsequent study of ventures that were launched in 1997. Based on the data, 50 percent of ventures survive for at least 4 years and about 30 percent survive for at least 10. There is almost no difference in survival rates between the 1992 and 1997 samples. The figure also shows survival rates of âhigh-growthâ ventures, where high growth is defined as at least a 50 percent increase in employees from 1992 to 1993 and a starting number of employees of at least five. The 4-year survival rates are higher for high-growth firmsâabout 72 percent over the 4 years following classification as high-growth.
Survival cannot be equated to success. In fact, in a Small Business Administration (SBA) study based on data compiled by the Census Bureau, one-third of the entrepreneurs of businesses that did not survive reported that they considered the venture a success.3 Among other possibilities of successful closure, nonsurviving businesses may have been established to take advantage of transitory opportunities, may have been closed in one location and reopened in another, or may have been acquired. The dashed line in Figure 1.1 shows an adjustment of the failure rate based on the one-third estimate.
Moreover, from 2000 through 2007 an average of 904,900 new businesses were created per year. The average number of business terminations during the same period was 744,100 per year, resulting in 160,800 average annual net new business formations, about 17 percent of the number of starts. As these statistics suggest, over 83 percent of new ventures eventually are terminated. The number terminated with financial loss to creditors via bankruptcy, however, is quite smallâonly 4.5 percent of all terminations. The remainder, âvoluntary terminations,â involve cases where the business was closed for inadequate profitability or where the owner simply decided to exit.4
FIGURE 1.1
Survival rates of new ventures
The figure shows survival rates of new business establishments that were initiated in 1992 or 1997, as well as survival rates for subsamples of establishments that were classified as high growth based on changes in number of employees from 1992 to 1993. The dashed line is an estimate of survivors plus nonsurvivors that were considered by the entrepreneur to have been successful.
SOURCE: 1998â2002 Business Information Tracking Series; available at http://www.census.gov/econ/sbo/longitudinal02/longitudinal02.html. Data available in B. Headd and B. Kirchhoff, âSmall Business Growth: Searching for Stylized Factsâ (working paper, Small Business Administration, Washington, DC, 2007).
Economic Downturns and Entrepreneurship
Starting a new venture or maintaining an existing small business is challenging even when product and financial markets are vibrant. The challenges can multiply when markets are stagnant. Financing can be scarce because the supply of capital to the markets is low. Moreover, providers of financing may be concerned that some prospective entrepreneurs are motivated more by necessity than by opportunity and may be concerned that the ventures they fund during recessions, if driven by necessity, will be slow to pay off. More concretely, financing can be difficult when venture capital money is not readily available, banks are not lending, and friends and family are strapped for cash.
There can, however, be positive features of starting a venture in a downturn. For an entrepreneur, the opportunity cost of starting a venture is lower when there are fewer traditional job market opportunities; competition may be less intense; it may be easier to hire qualified employees; and costs may be lower. Microsoft, Genentech, FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Gap, and The Limited were all founded during economic downturns. Hewlett-Packard, Polaroid, and Revlon were started during the Great Depression. Of the 30 companies that currently comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average, 18 were founded during recessions or bear markets. Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which led to massive layoffs from South Koreaâs large industrial conglomerates (chaebol), that country saw a significant increase in entrepreneurship.5
Globalization of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship now comes from almost everywhere, including once-closed command economies like China. Several developments have contributed to globalization. The personal computer, the wireless phone, and the Internet allow investors to reach markets that were inaccessible a few years ago. The importance of entrepreneurship in creating jobs and dynamic economies is now recognized by leading international entities like the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank, all of which encourage initiatives and provide financial support for entrepreneurship. Governments worldwide are enacting policies and providing financial subsidies that they hope will encourage entrepreneurs. Competition for ideas and for financing has increased dramatically in recent decades. Globalization of competition raises the stakes for everyone, particularly in the wealthier countries.
The World Bank ranks countries according to the supportiveness of their environments for starting and doing business. These rankings provide a clearer picture of international competitiveness. Figure 1.2 shows the most recent rankings of large-population countries. Ease of doing business (plotted in the figure) is based on 10 factors, including availability of financing, legal environment, and availability of employees. Ease of starting business is another of the 10 factors; we plot it separately in Figure 1.2 because it is the factor most closely related to stand-alone entrepreneurial activity. Countries that rank high on both dimensions, such as the first four in the figure, tend to be those that can support high-growth start-ups. Those that are high for ease of doing business but low for ease of starting business, such as Japan, Korea, and Mexico, tend to be countries where high-growth entrepreneurial activity is conducted mainly through established corporations and business groups. Those where ease of starting business is high but ease of doing business is low, like Cameroon, Ukraine, Indonesia, and India, tend to be relatively unregulated environments with weak infrastructures. Those where both are low, such as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Venezuela, tend to be turbulent environments with political unrest and dictatorships or militaristic factions.
FIGURE 1.2
Global difference in supportiveness for starting and doing business
The figure shows country ranks (highest being best) for ease of doing business and ease of starting business based on 10 equal-weighted factors that are assessed by the World Bank. Ease of starting a business is one of the 10 factors.
SOURCE: World Bank, 2009; available at http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/. Rankings are for large-population countries.
Types of Entrepreneurship
Replicative versus innovative. There is a useful distinction between âreplicativeâ and âinnovativeâ entrepreneurship. Schumpeter wrote extensively about innovative entrepreneurs, who âact as destabilizing influences triggering âcreative destructionââthe simultaneous creation of new industries through innovation and elimination of sectors of prior economies.â Innovative entrepreneurship ha...