A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World

The Land of (Entrepreneurial) Opportunity

The chief business of the American people is business.

—PRESIDENT CALVIN COOLIDGE, 1925

The United States, particularly during the period from the Civil War until the end of the twentieth century, stands as the quintessential entrepreneurial society. Certainly, there have been few nations and epochs so molded by entrepreneurship and its attendant marvels and perils as America was during that time. From John D. Rockefeller to Henry Ford and all the way to late twentieth-century Information Age pioneers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, America spawned one iconic and internationally renowned entrepreneur after another. Moreover, there were many other transformational American entrepreneurs during this period, some of whose stories may be less well known but are no less compelling than those of the business legends. Some of these lesser-known entrepreneurs will be spotlighted, alongside some of the legends, in this chapter.

As discussed in chapter 6, even as British colonies, the lands that would break away to become the first thirteen states of the Union were established as entrepreneurial projects by various British merchant companies. Regarding the colonial period, the American business landscape was dominated by slave-dependent planters in the southern colonies and merchants of various sorts—including those who traded in slaves—in the north. Both regions were teeming with eager entrepreneurs, many of whom were natural risk takers, having uprooted themselves from the British Isles in search of both adventure and wealth in the New World. Notably, the disproportionate level of entrepreneurship among immigrants continues to be a distinctive feature of American enterprise.

In the newly independent nation, the enterprising spirit of the former colonists only intensified—an intensification proudly fostered by the young country’s political and legal institutions. For example, in 1790, just fourteen years after America’s independence and only two years after the ratification of its Constitution, Congress passed a fairly comprehensive patent law to encourage industrial innovation. Clearly enterprise had been an integral element of the American project long before the late nineteenth century, when both the scale and ingenuity of American entrepreneurship would rise above all others.

The Crucible of War

During the first half of the nineteenth century, much of America had adopted the technological and organizational advances of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. It was the rapid industrialization of the northern states that helped lay the groundwork for a “battle of the states” in which slavery was at the very least one of several significant points of contention tied in with the wider issue of federalism and states’ rights. After all, it was the more agrarian South that had become reliant upon slave labor. Yet despite the carnage of the ensuing war, which would claim some 752,000 lives and destroy billions of dollars of property, the Civil War period of 1861 to 1865 marked an important transition in American entrepreneurship.

The eminent historians Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager date the emergence of what can be described as modern America to the war itself. “That conflict,” Nevins and Commager explain, “gave an immense stimulus to industry, speeded up the exploitation of natural resources, the development of large-scale manufacturing, the rise of investment banking, the extension of foreign commerce. It enormously accelerated the construction of the railway and telegraph network and ushered in the railroad age.” Perhaps most importantly, the Civil War “put a premium upon inventions and labor-saving devices and witnessed the large-scale application of these to agriculture as well as to industry.”¹

The Mass Producers

As in almost every war in recorded history, there were some entrepreneurs who profited handsomely from both sides of the struggle. During the Civil War, the most notorious of these was a Connecticut inventor-entrepreneur in the weapons industry by the name of Samuel Colt. The father of the Colt 45 and many other weapons that bear his name, Colt was the inventor of the revolving multichamber cylinder mechanism, commonly known as the “revolver.” Aside from various advances in firearms, Colt was also responsible for the first remotely detonated explosive and even some innovative work in the telegraph industry.

A highly successful gun manufacturer, Samuel Colt is still regarded as a pioneer of an American defense industry that continues to lead the world in both sales and technological sophistication. Yet like many American weaponry entrepreneurs who would follow in his wake, Colt was a contentious figure. By the time of the Civil War, the Connecticut Yankee was already an old hand at selling both sides of a war the means to obliterate each other. Colt, born in 1814, had played this opportunistic role in several mid-nineteenth-century inter-European conflicts. Up until the present day, private arms dealers, American and otherwise, have preserved this controversial approach to war profiteering.

However, the impact of Colt and his Colt Armory extended well beyond the defense industry. Along with the sewing machine maker Isaac Singer and the bicycle maker Colonel Albert Pope, the arms manufacturer was a pioneer of both mass production and the national advertising campaigns required to sell large quantities of competitively priced mass-produced goods.

Figure 8.1

Colt Model 1860 Army percussion revolver.

Source: Obtained with permission to reuse from Google Images (Wikipedia).

In 1863, the New York-born Singer and his fellow Yankee Edward Clark, with whom he had already enjoyed considerable success in the large-scale manufacture of sewing machines, formally established the Singer Manufacturing Company. By 1870 Singer and Clark’s company was producing more than one thousand sewing machines per day, an astonishing feat of mass production for that era and generally credited to Singer’s ingenuity. (Incidentally, the great “mass producer” would also be remembered as the man who fathered between twenty-three and twenty-six children—many of them in secret families he had established in various locales.) Both the Singer Manufacturing Company and the Colt Armory reaped enormous gains in efficiency by producing large quantities of components that were almost identical and then having them assembled into finished sewing machines and firearms, respectively. However, because there was still some slight variability in the components of these companies, “fitters” were employed to force components together.

Complete uniformity and, hence, interchangeability of components was only attained later in the century, with the work of the Boston-based bicycle maker Colonel Albert Pope. Having established the Pope Manufacturing Company in 1878, the former Union soldier proved a master of the manufacturing process, with components “machined to two-thousandths of an inch.”² Such unprecedented fineness of production and component uniformity, whereby any part A would, without any forcing and finessing, fit perfectly with any part B, accelerated and cheapened the assembly process dramatically. Due in part to the colonel’s remarkable advances in mass production, by the early 1890s America was seized by a bicycle craze.

The “Robber Baron” Philanthropists

In medieval Germany, the armed noblemen along the Rhine River who would demand tribute from passing ships were known as “robber barons.” In nineteenth-century America, the term was used as a colorful slur against wealthy industrialists believed to have engaged in aggressive business tactics. These included the likes of John Astor, fur and opium trader; Cornelius Vanderbilt, shipping magnate; and Jay Gould, railroad speculator. The two most renowned of these men, particularly during the post–Civil War period, were Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Despite being derided as robber barons during their lifetimes, in time both of these industrialists would also be lauded as great philanthropists.

Carnegie, born and raised in Scotland, was certainly not the first in America’s celebrated line of legendary immigrant entrepreneurs. John Astor, for example, was born Johann Jakob Astor in what is now Germany and in 1848 died as America’s wealthiest man. In a sense, Carnegie carried the torch of “New American” mega-entrepreneurship into the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the Scotsman’s transformation from poor immigrant to American tycoon would serve as a model for the many eager immigrant entrepreneurs who streamed into the country during the twentieth century.

Born in 1835 to a handloom weaver, Carnegie would witness the impact of the Industrial Revolution firsthand when its efficiencies rendered his father’s trade obsolete and threw his family into severe financial hardship. As it has for many successful entrepreneurs before and since, the pain of childhood poverty would serve as a compelling motivator for Andrew. “It was burnt into my heart then that my father had to beg for work,” Carnegie recalled, “and, then and there, came the resolve that I would cure that when I got to be a man.”³ The loss of his father’s job to a mechanized operation also inspired a lifelong reverence for technology that would yield substantial competitive advantages for the future steel magnate.

Shortly before Andrew’s thirteenth birthday, the impoverished Carnegie family left Scotland and joined a group of relatives who had settled on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shortly after landing in America, Andrew, who only had five years of schooling in Scotland, was sent to work the furnace of a cotton factory, a terrifying job that gave him nightmares and motivated the youth to seek employment elsewhere. He was soon working in a telegraph office, and six years later Carnegie was hired as the personal telegrapher and secretary of Thomas Scott.

Scott was the superintendent of the Pittsburgh division of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, among the largest enterprises in nineteenth-century America. By 1859, Carnegie had succeeded Scott in what was a fairly stable and well-paid position. However, it soon became evident that any salaried position, no matter how lucrative and prestigious, would not do for the wide-eyed Scottish immigrant. Even while he served as superintendent, Carnegie’s independent business activities were extensive and varied, ranging from investments in various railroad parts manufacturers to the sale of American railroad-related securities to foreigners during trips to Europe.

It was during one of these trips that Carnegie, impressed by the emerging British iron and steel industries, foresaw the growing demand for such operations in a rapidly expanding America. So in 1865, Carnegie resigned from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company to manage the Keystone Bridge Company, a Pittsburgh iron bridge–building enterprise that he had invested in several years earlier. In one of his earlier strokes of promotional genius, upon building the 2,200-foot-long Mississippi Bridge, Carnegie demonstrated its sturdiness by inviting the press to watch an elephant make its leisurely way across. However, his most brilliant promotional maneuver occurred in 1873 when Carnegie named his new plant the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works, after the man who was running the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. Of course, Thomson was running the company to which Carnegie hoped to sell enormous quantities of steel, which is precisely what happened.

The emerging steel magnate had also developed a reputation for thrift due to his disdain for credit and his merciless cost-cutting measures. However, when it came to maintaining a technological edge over his competitors, Carnegie spared no expense. In the 1870s, he built the first American steel mills that used the more efficient steelmaking process developed by Henry Bessemer, an Englishman mentioned in chapter 7. Two decades later, Carnegie’s Pittsburgh plants were converted to an open-hearth system. The transformation required an enormous investment, but Carnegie foresaw, correctly, that the resulting efficiencies would make him the world’s largest steel producer. Even his more established competitors back in Britain would be left behind, and by 1900 Carnegie’s plants produced more steel than all of the British plants combined. Moreover, largely due to the Carnegie Steel Company, from 1865 to 1900 American steel production expanded from nineteen thousand to ten million tons.

In 1900 alone, the steel magnate’s personal share of his corporation’s profits exceeded $25 million, well over $700 million in 2015 funds. Carnegie, a poor immigrant boy who had risen to the pinnacle of wealth through shrewd and energetic entrepreneurship, is still regarded by some as a timeless embodiment of the American Dream. Yet for some of his employees and for the labor movement in general, the Carnegie Steel Company was an American nightmare. One of its plants in particular, Homestead, was aptly described by a Pittsburgh newspaper as “the scene of a great conflict between capital and labor.”⁴

Essentially, Carnegie offered terms that offended the workers, thereby resulting in the Homestead Strike. Worse yet, Henry Clay Frick, the man a vacationing Carnegie entrusted to handle the dispute, brought in men who killed ten workers in the ensuing melee. The steel magnate’s disastrously hardheaded handling of labor grievances at Homestead would scar his reputation permanently, and many of those who once admired Carnegie as a hero of American ingenuity now saw him as the quintessential robber baron.

Moreover, the strike was only the most renowned of several incidents in which Carnegie and his associates were accused of callousness. These accusations troubled the conscience of a man torn between personal ambition and the notion that entrepreneurship and its resulting wealth should benefit the masses. Revealingly, in his Gospel of Wealth, when reflecting on the benefits of philanthropy for the giver, Carnegie mused that such generosity provides a “refuge from self-questioning.”⁵

In 1901, the Carnegie Steel Corporation was sold to the United States Steel Corporation, an entity controlled by the financier J. P. Morgan. Andrew Carnegie pocketed an astonishing $250 million from the sale—more than $7 billion in current funds—and devoted the remainder of his life to philanthropy. He certainly adhered to his “gospel of wealth,” spending almost his entire fortune on a wide variety of philanthropic projects, including more than three thousand libraries around the world. Like Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller would also dedicate his retirement years to philanthropic projects. There were several factors, including Rockefeller’s deep Baptist faith, behind this generosity. Nonetheless, there is no question that, like his Scottish acquaintance and erstwhile rival, the elder Rockefeller was eager to shed his robber baron image.

Like Carnegie’s, the early life of John Davison Rockefeller was exceptionally challenging, albeit for different reasons. For one, Rockefeller was far removed from Carnegie’s immigrant experience. The Rockefellers descended from Johann Peter Rockenfeller (the surname was altered slightly in America), who left Germany in 1723 to settle in what was then the northern colony of New Jersey. John was born 116 years later in Richford, a small town in south-central New York State. Yet despite the fact that both sides of his family had relatively deep roots in America, Rockefeller’s early life was marked by the same economic insecurity that had plagued the Carnegie family.

The source of the Rockefeller household’s misfortune was its head, William Rockefeller Sr. “Big Bill” was a lifelong womanizer who dabbled in the lumber industry before becoming a full-time huckster. His financial situation was unstable and, worse yet, his many scandals humiliated his family, particularly his brooding eldest son John. These disgraces, which included an 1848 indictment for rape, were compounded further by Bill’s frequent and often extended absences from home. Most notably, in 1856, while still married to John’s mother, he adopted an alias and married another woman in Canada. However, by then, John had already become what Rockefeller biographer Ron Chernow described as the “stand-in” for his father, and the teenager “kept a tight rein on the family budget and learned to appraise the world shrewdly.”⁶

Due to the difficult circumstances endured by their families, both Rockefeller and Carnegie were compelled to assume significant financial responsibilities as youths: experiences that are common to many successful entrepreneurs. However, unlike Carnegie, Rockefeller completed school and did not linger long in a salaried position before becoming an entrepreneur. At the age of eighteen, Rockefeller formed a partnership with his neighbor in Cleveland, Ohio—the last of several locales to which Big Bill had moved the family over the years. Clark & Rockefeller became a successful “commission house” that bought and sold various bulk goods.

However, like Carnegie, Rockefeller always had an eye out for bigger game, and by 1863, having tired of dealing in bulk goods, the twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur went all in for oil. He recognized that, especially in the oil fields of the neighboring state of Pennsylvania, there was more oil being extracted from the pits than current refining capacity could handle. Consequently, if Rockefeller could establish a refinery that delivered a high-quality product, he knew that there would be ample opportunity for large-scale expansion. Moreover, as oil use later expanded from lamp fuel to powering various cycling vehicles and then automobiles, Rockefeller and his son and successor John D. Rockefeller Jr. were well-positioned to reap the rewards.

He became a partner in Andrews, Clark & Company, a refinery that, after Rockefeller bought out Clark and his brothers, became Andrews & Rockefeller. This would be the first of a long string of buyouts and other, more controversial, maneuvers that would cement Rockefeller’s dominance of his industry. In 1870 he and several partners established Standard Oil. Within two years, this Rockefeller-led company, still based in Cleveland, had gained control of almost every refinery in the city.

For those competing refineries he was unable to purchase or effectively control through some sort of “partnership,” Rockefeller would devise clever schemes that squeezed the holdouts until they relented. For example, by leveraging the size of his growing empire of refineries, Rockefeller was able to negotiate a significant hidden rebate from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and others. In this way, while it seemed that Standard Oil was paying the very same rate as competitor X, with the hidden rebates, Standard was actually paying considerably less, thereby putting X at a significant competitive disadvantage. In time, frequent use of such heavy-handed tactics would tarnish the prominent oil magnate’s reputation.

Among the all-time masters of large-scale entrepreneurship, Rockefeller continually leveraged the size of his business to expand it further. The chairman of Standard Oil was also savvy enough to collaborate with the dominant entities of complementary industries, especially transportation, for his company’s benefit. Aside from the Pennsylvania Railroad, these included the Erie Railroad (controlled by Jay Gould), and the Empire and Star freight lines. Conversely, the smaller railroads and refineries excluded from the Rockefeller cabal generally operated “from day to day without cohesion or long-range planning,” as the business historian Albert Z. Carr characterized it. “On the principle that power tends toward those who seek it,” Carr continues, “the advantage was all with Rockefeller and his associates.”⁷

Although he was not an inventor in the technical sense, as an avid opportunist, Rockefeller was open to novel methods of all sorts that might advance the interests of Standard Oil. For example, with respect to corporate structure, Standard, first incorporated as an Ohio company, became the country’s first business trust; then, to evade recently enacted U.S. antitrust laws, it morphed into one of America’s first holding companies. In fact, the antitrust laws of 1890 were aimed squarely at the monopolistic practices of Rockefeller and Gould and their cronies. The clamor for such laws reflected the widening gulf between the interests of large-scale enterprises and those of smaller American enterprises threatened by the new behemoths. In subsequent decades, this divergence would be the source of frustration for some smaller entrepreneurs and opportunity for others.

Rockefeller, the wealthiest American in recorded history, with a total fortune equivalent to almost $400 billion in 2015 funds, came to epitomize both the power and the pitfalls of large-scale industry. Before Hollywood and professional sports took hold of the national imagination, the great entrepreneurs were America’s foremost celebrities. There were some in the press who cited both Rockefeller’s monopolist practices and Carnegie’s labor practices as cautionary tales about industrial power concentrated in the hands of robber barons. Meanwhile, others marveled at the astonishing wealth of these self-made entrepreneurs and, in later years, their generosity. Regarding the latter, Rockefeller dedicated the last four decades of his ninety-seven-year life to philanthropy that still supports many prestigious educational, medical, and scientific institutions.

Miracles of Light and Sound: American Inventor-Entrepreneurship

There were only 276 inventions filed with the U.S. Patent Office during the 1790–1799 period. One hundred years later, during the decade of the 1890s, the same office processed the filings of an astonishing 235,000 new inventions. As highlighted earlier, late nineteenth-century America provided a legal system that was generally sympathetic to inventors, especially inventor-entrepreneurs. This supportive infrastructure benefited some highly inventive and ambitious minds and fostered an American echo of the British inventor-entrepreneurship of the Industrial Revolution.

In fact, one of the two most famous American inventor-entrepreneurs of the late nineteenth century was Alexander Graham Bell, an American citizen born and raised in Britain. Bell invented the telephone while alternating between an American residence in Boston and a Canadian one in Brantford, Ontario. That is why Britain, Canada, and the United States have all laid some claim to the man behind one of the world’s most extraordinary inventions. Yet Bell, like the best of his native land’s inventor-entrepreneurs, also managed to prosper from his ingenuity, earning tens of millions of dollars in current funds. Along with an attorney, a financier, and his renowned assistant Thomas Watson, Bell established the Bell Telephone Company. Both AT&T (“Ma Bell”) and Bell Canada began as subsidiaries of that company.

However, the most famous inventor of that time and of all time was not Bell but Thomas Edison. Almost inhumanly prolific, the midwesterner authored 1,328 patents. More importantly, the impact of his labyrinth of intellectual property was staggering. Along with what Edison described as the “soft radiance”⁸ of electric light, he also invented phonographs and moving pictures. In fact, at least from a technical perspective, it was Edison who laid the foundation for an American entertainment industry that would mesmerize the world during the next century. Aside from protecting his intellectual property, the inventor was savvy enough to establish the Edison Electric Light Company and then pocket the equivalent of more than $50 million in current funds from selling it to J. P. Morgan.

An Unlikely Entrepreneur: Andrew Beard

Although some of the American entrepreneurs highlighted in this chapter thus far were immigrants, all were white and, more specifically, of the white Protestant stock that dominated American entrepreneurship well into the twentieth century. As Max Weber details in The Protestant Ethic, hard work and individualism are important aspects of Protestantism. So America’s Protestant roots help account for the unusual vigor of American enterprise, a vigor that would be adopted by many Catholics and Jews, whose numbers were swelling from the 1880–1924 Great Wave of immigration. However, during this period, non-Protestants were deliberately kept on the periphery of American industry. In later years, some of the more ambitious of these outsiders responded by developing businesses, even industries, of their own.

Yet especially during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, the discrimination endured by immigrant Catholics and Jews paled in comparison to the legally sanctioned second-class citizenship of African Americans. In the immediate aftermath of slavery, the efforts of Reconstruction largely failed to guarantee basic rights to black southerners. During the era of Jim Crow that followed, laws were passed that disenfranchised many African Americans and largely kept them trapped in subsistence-level domestic and agricultural employment. That is why black entrepreneurial success stories from this era are so remarkable. The life of Andrew Beard, a black slave who became a notable inventor-entrepreneur, is perhaps the most significant of these Cinderella stories.

For nineteenth-century America, it would be difficult to imagine socioeconomic circumstances more disadvantaged than those of Beard’s early life. Born near Birmingham, Alabama, in 1849, the young Andrew knew nothing but slavery until 1864 when Congress, following President Lincoln’s lead, abolished the institution. In an early indication of the young man’s extraordinary initiative, during his first year of freedom, Beard married his sweetheart and set up a small homestead of his own on the rural outskirts of Birmingham.

A natural innovator, Beard was continually experimenting with tool modifications and new processes to enhance the productivity of his farm. He patented the first of these, a more efficient plow, in 1881, and proceeded to sell the patent for $4,000—more than $100,000 in current funds. Six years later, Beard patented yet another ingenious plow design, which he managed to sell for around $150,000 in current funds. A true inventor-entrepreneur, Beard parlayed the early fruits of his inventiveness into a series of successful real estate speculations. He also filed a patent for a more efficient flour mill and ran such a mill on his property for several years.

Before turning forty, Beard had distinguished himself as both a serial inventor and a self-made entrepreneur, accomplishments of which anyone of any race would have been proud. However, for a young African American man to attain these lofty goals in the immediate aftermath of slavery was truly astonishing. Pressing on, in 1892 the forty-three-year-old inventor filed a patent pertaining to an enhancement of the steam-powered rotary engine. Shortly thereafter, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Beard went to work in the railroad industry.

During the 1890s, as the railroads expanded their reach through the newer territories of the West, lines were also being added in the east, including Alabama and other southeastern states. Beard was employed in the railroad yards where, among other tasks, he was responsible for linking railway cars together. In a procedure known as “car coupling,” Beard had to drop a metal pin that would link two moving cars together at the very moment they were about to make contact. Of course, timing such a movement accurately could be a perilous procedure, and a career in car coupling often ended with the railway worker being crushed between two cars. Of those who survived such an accident, many, like Andrew Beard, lost a limb in the process.

Endowed with the opportunistic attitude of most successful entrepreneurs, instead of grieving over the loss of his leg and, consequently, his job, Beard resolved to invent an automatic coupler that would help prevent such accidents. In 1897, a patent was issued for Beard’s “jenny coupler,” a clever contraption that linked cars together automatically. There were a number of other automatic coupler patents that had been issued previously, but Beard’s design was especially strong and his patent sold to a New York City firm for the equivalent of almost $1.5 million in current funds. Little is known about the remainder of Beard’s life, but as a creatively and financially successful black inventor-entrepreneur during some of the bleakest years of the African American experience, he had already secured his place in history.

Henry Ford: Twentieth-Century Titan

During the mid-1890s, as Andrew Beard was experimenting with railcar couplers in Alabama, a young midwesterner was conducting some transportation experiments of his own as he built his first gasoline-powered “quadricycle.” While Henry Ford was not the first to build, let alone invent, what would become known as the automobile, he would be the first to mass-produce the new wonder vehicle successfully. In Ford’s own words, he set out to “democratize the automobile” by manufacturing and pricing it to accommodate the needs of the middle class. In the process, he revolutionized everyday life throughout the world. Consequently, Ford came to personify the ingenuity, energy, and power of early twentieth-century entrepreneurship in America, the young country whose industrial output had recently surpassed Great Britain’s.

The grandson of Irish Protestant immigrants, Ford, born in 1863, was raised on his family’s large farm near Dearborn, Michigan. Even as a young boy, Henry was a habitual, even obsessive, tinkerer. This tendency was so pronounced that his siblings would hide their toys when Henry came around, knowing that he would promptly disassemble their playthings and attempt to build something new. As Ford grew up, along with his mechanical inclinations, his disdain for farm work became disappointingly evident to his father. Clocks, trains, and practically every other machine that existed in the Dearborn area were a source of continual fascination for the boy.

By the age of sixteen, finished with school and eager to realize his mechanical ambitions, Ford relocated to Detroit to work as a machinist. After working in such a capacity for several employers in Detroit and then doing a stint in Dearborn as a steam engine repairman for Westinghouse, Ford, now a husband and father, moved his family back to Detroit in 1891 for a new opportunity: Ford had been hired at the local branch of the Edison Illuminating Company. Established by Thomas Edison eleven years earlier, his new employer operated electricity-generating stations in several large urban markets. Two years later, Ford was promoted to chief engineer and was on standby at all hours to address potential electrical service interruptions. Consequently, he did not need to put in regular office hours on the company’s premises.

For an inventive young man who had built his own tractor back in Dearborn just a few years earlier, the promotion was an ideal scenario. After all, Ford was being paid handsomely to maintain a flexible work schedule that allowed him to spend long stretches of time in his home workshop. The results speak for themselves. By the end of the year, Ford had completed work on a functional gasoline-powered engine; in 1896, he had completed work on his first Quadricycle; and several car designs later, he launched his first company in 1899. The Henry Ford Company, which became the Cadillac Motor Car Company after its founder left in 1902, focused primarily on racing cars.

Captivated by the vision of building a more practical car for the masses, the budding entrepreneur established the Ford Motor Company in 1903. A testament to its founder’s extraordinary resourcefulness, the automaker that now employs a global workforce of almost two hundred thousand began with a total capital investment of less than $1 million in current funds. The new company found eager buyers for its vehicles, although the Model A initially took twelve hours to manufacture. In October of 1908, the first of the more than 16 million Model Ts that would be sold over the next eighteen years rolled off the Ford assembly lines. The latter had been reengineered successfully, inspired by the efficiency of the disassembly line of Chicago meatpackers, and the democratization of the automobile had arrived.

In his autobiography My Life and Work, Ford laid out his idealistic vision behind building a “business that wants to serve 95 per cent of the community.”⁹ This vision was the inspiration behind the unparalleled production speed that facilitated the affordable pricing for which Ford vehicles became known. As well, the company shrewdly leveraged the “everyman” appeal of the Model T in its advertising materials. “It’s the one reliable car that does not require a $10,000 income to buy,” a promotional booklet distributed in Ford dealerships read, “a $5,000 bank account to run and a college course in engineering to keep in order.”¹⁰

Unlike some entrepreneurs of his era or, for that matter, our own, Ford possessed an intuitive grasp of enlightened self-interest. For example, troubled at the high turnover rate at his assembly line, Ford, against some of his associates’ advice, acceded to his vice president’s suggestion to raise the daily wage to five dollars per day. Aside from solving the turnover problem, the increased salary, almost three times the standard rate for assembly work, made loyal Ford customers of many employees. Of course, he was also known to harbor certain views that many would regard as less enlightened, such as his strident anti-Semitism.

Ford’s innovative approach to product assembly, promotions, and labor relations would pay enormous dividends, and by 1921 the Model T had captured 60 percent of the new car market. “Legendary entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, Dave Packard, and Bill Gates,” Jack and Suzy Welch observed, “are undeniably examples of the excitement and glory of starting something new from scratch and watching it grow to astonishing proportions.”¹¹ In time, more vigorous competitors, particularly General Motors, would diminish those proportions somewhat. Nonetheless, long after the passing of its founder, the Ford Motor Company continues to innovate and enjoy periods of great success. In 1947, when Henry Ford died from a brain hemorrhage, his net worth in current terms exceeded $190 billion.

Al Capone: Underworld Entrepreneur

Another internationally renowned, albeit less revered, American entrepreneur passed away in 1947. However, aside from the years of their deaths and the possession of extraordinary business skills, Henry Ford and Al Capone had little in common. The son of immigrant Italians who had arrived in New York just six years before his birth in 1899, Alphonse Capone spent his early childhood in a run-down Brooklyn tenement. In 1910 the Capone family moved to a better neighborhood in the same borough. By all accounts, Al’s father, a barber, and his pious mother, a seamstress, were both upstanding citizens in every respect. From an early age, it was evident that little Alphonse was not.

The short but bulky kid joined up with the toughest juvenile gangs, including one run by Johnny Torrio, the man who would later become his mentor in crime. Meanwhile, Al was having a difficult time at the Catholic school to which his parents sent him. His last day there was particularly trying, ending with a caning administered by his principal. It seems that earlier in the day, the temperamental student had assaulted one of his teachers. After the caning, he decided to quit school. Capone hadn’t completed the sixth grade.

Despite his academic delinquency, as a teenager he made several attempts to live what gangsters of the era called “the straight life.” Capone found employment as a cloth cutter in a bookbinding company and in other low-paying but respectable jobs. The serious trouble began when Capone decided to supplement his income with part-time work as a bouncer at the Harvard Inn, a Coney Island nightclub that, despite its amusingly pretentious name, was run by a mobster. Frankie Yale, the establishment’s owner, was a powerful gangster-entrepreneur from whom the tough-minded bouncer would learn a lot.

Moreover, it was at the Harvard Inn where an eighteen-year-old Capone, having dishonored a young woman with a crude compliment, sustained a knife injury on the face from her outraged brother. Soon thereafter he would be known as “Scarface.” By the time of Capone’s knife injury, his old friend Torrio had been recruited by James Colosimo to help run the extensive network of nightclubs, brothels, and gambling dens that “Big Jim” owned in Chicago. Business in the Windy City was brisk and Torrio, needing a lieutenant, recruited Capone in 1919.

The timing of Scarface’s overnight promotion to the executive suite of Chicago’s nightclub and brothel operations was auspicious: between 1921 and 1928, Americans’ per capita income grew by almost 40 percent to $716, then the highest in the world. With unprecedented sums of disposable money in their pockets, aside from Model Ts and other vehicles, Americans purchased washing machines, radios, gramophones, and electric refrigerators, thereby laying the foundation for modern consumerism. Particularly in urban centers like Chicago, they also spent plenty of money on the less virtuous products and services that Capone and friends provided.

Foremost among these was alcohol. The National Prohibition Act, passed in 1919, went into effect in 1920. The illicit trade in alcohol was tailor-made for the likes of Colosimo, a man who had built a business empire largely around the outlawed businesses of prostitution and gambling. Colosimo, Torrio, and others were well schooled in the peculiar mix of bribery, intimidation, and violence that such fringe enterprises entailed. Yet Colosimo was reluctant to become a bootlegger. Salivating over getting in on a new “racket” at the ground level, a frustrated Torrio proceeded to murder his boss with the help of both Capone and Yale.

Figure 8.2

Al Capone.

Source: Obtained with permission to reuse from Google Images (fbi.gov).

Five years later, when Torrio retired, Capone would take his place as the kingpin. By then Torrio’s protégé had proven his mettle and was already running much of the operation himself, finding creative ways of obtaining product from Canadian shipments (ostensibly sent to Cuba to bypass Canadian customs on the lookout for American-bound alcohol) and an assortment of domestic “wildcat” breweries. When it came to supplying a market, Scarface, like Rockefeller, was a gifted monopolist. To this end, Capone, a man who had given up on “going straight” long ago, was free to use a wider range of persuasion techniques than the CEO of Standard Oil.

For example, if a speakeasy chose not to purchase Capone’s booze, its owner would be threatened, and if he or she still would not relent, the establishment would be bombed. Then Scarface would offer to loan money for the repairs: the Capone carrot and stick. Of course, there were other Chicago-area gangsters of various ethnicities, Polish, Irish, Jewish, German, and others, who engaged in similar activities. However, gangsters like Bugs Moran (the man whose underlings were executed in Capone’s Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre) and Hymie Weiss never attained the same notoriety because, unlike Capone, they never succeeded in monopolizing the bootlegging business.

Scarface also possessed a rare entrepreneurial adaptability, likely a product of the street smarts honed during his youth. For example, when a new mayor of Chicago decided to enforce Prohibition more strictly, Capone relocated to the suburb of Cicero and effectively colonized it. In short order, he established the town’s first betting parlor and converted Cicero into the hub of his interstate bootlegging network. At its peak, Capone’s enterprise of vice took in the modern equivalent of $1.6 billion annually and employed four hundred workers, many of them white collar.

Instead of roughing someone up in an alleyway, most of the kingpin’s working hours were spent sitting at a desk in a well-appointed office, taking phone calls from suppliers and distributors, conferring with his deputies, and strategizing expansion opportunities. “I make my money by supplying a public demand…Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman,” Capone once explained, “When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive [a fashionable section of the Chicago waterfront], it’s hospitality.”¹²

There’s no question that Capone, like most of his rivals, was a cold-blooded murderer. However, that does not negate the fact that he was also a talented underworld entrepreneur who, like those of later decades who smuggled illicit drugs into America and elsewhere, recognized an unmet consumer demand and profited from it. Nonetheless, in time, Capone’s criminality, along with his reckless lifestyle, led to his ruin. He would serve nine years of his eleven-year prison sentence for tax evasion in Alcatraz. Capone was allowed out early due to evident deterioration from syphilis, a condition the married father of one had contracted from a prostitute at one of his own brothels. He passed away several years after his release, at the age of forty-eight.

The Great Depression: Starting Up During a Downturn

In 1922, several years before he became president, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover wrote American Individualism, a book extolling the virtues of America’s individualistic political and economic system. “We build our society,” Hoover wrote, “on the attainment of the individual.”¹³ However, in the midst of the economic carnage of the following decade, the era of the Great Depression, such individualism became less popular. So aside from the diminished opportunity that resulted from the anemic economy of the 1930s, from the entrepreneurial perspective, a pernicious attitudinal shift was taking place in American society. In such an environment, ambitious American entrepreneurs were more likely to be regarded skeptically, even disapprovingly, by the public, the press, and even the government.

Nonetheless, there were those who, among the rubble of a ruined economy, recognized the seeds of opportunity. For example, Charles Darrow, who lost his job selling heaters in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, helped make other economically distressed Americans feel rich by playing his game of real estate acquisition. In 1935 the Philadelphia resident filed a patent for Monopoly, and within a year Parker Brothers was selling twenty thousand copies of Darrow’s game every week.

Even before America’s official entry into World War II, the conflict had helped lift the country out of economic inertia by stimulating production of weapons and supplies for a besieged Britain and a U.S. military that was all but certain to be drawn into the war in the near future. The war itself brought America back to full employment and rising wages. Moreover, when the veterans returned, the generous benefits of the G.I. Bill were an impetus behind the large families of the baby boom and the vast expansion of housing to accommodate them. In the years following the war, America, long the world’s preeminent industrial power, was now the wealthiest civilization in recorded history. With disposable income at an all-time high, a wider variety of opportunities emerged—including some from unlikely sources.

Atlantic Records: Mining for Black Gold

In 1944, shortly before the end of the war, the Turkish ambassador to the United States passed away in Washington, D.C. Upon his death, Munir Ertegun’s wife and daughter decided to move back to Turkey. However, his two sons Nesuhi and Ahmet decided to stay in America. Since their family had relocated to the American capital nine years earlier, the Ertegun brothers had developed a fascination, even an obsession, with African American culture. What captivated them the most was black music, which at that time consisted primarily of jazz and, increasingly, blues and related forms of music.

In fact, by the time of his father’s passing, a twenty-seven-year-old Nesuhi was already out in Los Angeles running a record store that specialized in such music. Meanwhile, Ahmet, only twenty-one, was studying philosophy at Georgetown University but spending much of his time learning about the music business at record stores in D.C.’s large black community. Both young men were eager to pursue their passion for this exotic music, but born into the Turkish aristocracy and accustomed to luxury, they had to find a way to make it pay. By the end of the war, Ahmet, a gifted entrepreneur, was confident that it would.

“Black people had work. Women had work. Everybody had work and people had money,” Ahmet observed, speaking of the immediate postwar period in America, “And there was a sudden boom for records and there wasn’t enough supply of records and there weren’t enough pressing plants.”¹⁴ By 1947 Ahmet was ready to launch a record company. With a substantial investment from the Erteguns’ family dentist, all Ahmet needed was a partner. The dentist provided that as well, in the form of a young man who had trained under him only to return to New York City and give up dentistry for music talent scouting.

In October of 1947, Ertegun and Herb Abramson launched Atlantic Records and initially ran it out of a Manhattan hotel for more than a year before settling into office space on Fifty-Fourth Street. Atlantic enjoyed considerable success during its early years, due in part to the reverence its founders shared for their predominantly black artists, a reverence that translated into paying them the same royalty rates as the major labels. After 1953, when Abramson was, effectively, replaced by Jerry Wexler, that culture would continue. Ben E. King, a singer in The Drifters, and later, on his own, the voice of “Stand by Me,” was an Atlantic artist from South Carolina. “I am from an era and a place where people would say, ‘Hey, you don’t talk until you’re talked to.’ And then I was brought to New York where people [Ertegun and Wexler] asked me for advice!”¹⁵

Many of those behind the “race music” labels of this post-jazz era were, like Abramson, Wexler, and the Bihari brothers of Modern and Meteor Records, the sons of Jewish immigrants or, in the case of Leonard and Phil Chess of Chess and Checkers Records, Jewish immigrants themselves. There were also a number of celebrated executives of Italian background, such as Tommy LiPuma, not to mention, of course, the Turkish Muslim immigrants Ahmet and his brother Nesuhi, who would join Atlantic in 1955.

Motown Records, founded by the black entrepreneur Berry Gordy Jr., would not be established until 1959. So during this period of the late 1940s and the early 1950s, recording and distributing black music was to a large degree the work of these very ethnic Caucasians. Perhaps it took a certain sense of otherness from being Jewish, Italian, and/or an immigrant to build a business around a culture that was still considered alien by the American mainstream. After all, only a few years earlier, while whites of all sorts served side by side in the U.S. military of World War II, black soldiers were still kept isolated in their own units.

Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own describes the immigrant origins of many of the entrepreneurs who established Hollywood during the early decades of the twentieth century. Describing Carl Laemmle, an immigrant from Germany and the founding father of Universal Studios, Gabler states that “one of the reasons Jews like Laemmle were able to gain a foothold” was that “big money, gentile money, viewed the movies suspiciously—economically, as a fad; morally, as potential embarrassments.”¹⁶ Post-jazz black music, particularly blues, soul, and the other precursors to rock ’n’ roll, was viewed in a similarly derisive light by mainstream America during the early years of Atlantic. Yet it was that disdain that left the door open to outsiders with an entrepreneurial bent, people like Ahmet and Jerry, the son of a window cleaner.

Including such luminaries as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, The Coasters, The Drifters, Sam & Dave, and many others, the Atlantic roster reads like a who’s who of the soul music of that era. Under Nesuhi’s direction, the label also picked up a strong stable of jazz artists including Charles Mingus and the Modern Jazz Quartet. In later years, Atlantic would also sign some notable rock acts, many of which, like the British bands Cream and Led Zeppelin, were deeply influenced by black music.

In 1967, a year of monster hits for Aretha Franklin, Cream, and other Atlantic artists, Wexler believed that it was an opportune time to cash out. The Erteguns were less enthusiastic but eventually relented. So in October of that year, Atlantic was sold to Warner Brothers Records for the equivalent of roughly $120 million in current funds. The fact that Warner was willing to pay that kind of money was proof that the entrepreneurs behind Atlantic had found and developed a significant opportunity to which the major labels had been blind. Jerry continued working at the company until 1975, and Ahmet would remain for several decades longer. Both partners passed away in the 2000s.

Other People’s Money: The Investor-Entrepreneurs

The Warner-Atlantic deal was hardly unusual for the second half of the 1960s. There was a merger wave under way not only in entertainment but across many industries. From initial public offerings (IPOs) to the prospect of being acquired by a larger entity for a big payout, the vibrancy of American finance not only facilitated large-scale enterprise but, by making it possible for the principals of a start-up like Atlantic to make such a lucrative exit, stimulated entrepreneurship on all levels.

Although Warner Brothers Music was still privately held, the overall merger wave was prompted, in part, by the high stock prices of the late 1960s. Following a crash in 1966, the market hit some new highs over several years, until the recession of 1973 to 1975. The relatively high market capitalizations of the late 1960s provided expanding companies with ample ammunition for hunting attractive acquisition targets. Other stakeholders who benefited from those high prices were investors who had purchased the same companies at much lower valuations earlier in the decade. One of these individuals was Warren Buffett.

Known today as America’s second wealthiest individual, Buffett was just starting to garner national attention in the late 1960s with the astounding returns of his investment partnership. With the help of his vice chairman Charlie Munger, the Omaha native has since expanded his operations into a $300 billion publicly traded entity known as Berkshire Hathaway (the name of a textile mill that Buffett bought out in 1964). Berkshire, an enterprise of enterprises, boasts full ownership of such marquee brands as GEICO and Dairy Queen and significant minority positions in such companies as Coca-Cola and IBM.

In 1974, another notable investor-entrepreneur, John Bogle, established the Vanguard Group. A mutual fund company that specializes in index funds, Vanguard has since become a major provider of exchange-traded funds as well. The Pennsylvania-based company manages $3 trillion in assets and is the largest mutual fund company in America. Like Buffett’s family, Bogle’s was also hit hard by the Depression, and both investment masters adhere to prudent investing principles. Buffett and Bogle, along with dozens of other prominent American investor-entrepreneurs, built lasting enterprises that, through expansion and innovation, have permanently altered the money management landscape in America and beyond.

It was also in the 1970s when chinks in the armor of America’s long-standing industrial dominance became apparent. During much of that decade, the country was beset by inflation, energy crises, and relatively high unemployment. Meanwhile, efficient foreign competitors, particularly those from Japan, were making domestic inroads into cars and consumer electronics, industries that to a great extent were invented in America. There was an element of copycat in those imports although the superior efficiencies attained by some foreign competitors were certainly innovative. Along with abundant physical and human resources, it had been America’s ingenuity, powered by entrepreneurial energy, that had given birth to those industries. In the 1970s a much-needed new industry was emerging from “out of left field,” the West Coast.

A Tale of Two Dropouts: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the PC Revolution

Although the region would not be known as Silicon Valley until the early 1970s, California’s Santa Clara Valley had already been a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity for several decades prior. Much of the credit is owed to Frederick Terman, the Stanford engineering professor who, as far back as the late 1920s, lobbied for government-funded projects in which university faculty and students collaborated with industry. Moreover, Terman actively encouraged his students to convert their ideas into businesses. In this manner, he converted Stanford into a giant start-up incubator. His two most famous engineering students were Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who would found Hewlett Packard in 1939. In later decades, other notable Stanford start-ups included Sun (Stanford University Network) Microsystems and Cisco Systems.

However, the University of California–Berkeley scholar AnnaLee Saxenian attributes the entrepreneurial dynamism of the valley to employment mobility ¹⁷. Therefore, it can be traced even further back than Terman—to 1872, when the twenty-two-year-old state of California enacted its first civil code. Within the code was a curious provision safeguarding the right of Californians to change employers as they saw fit. In practice, that meant that employees could not be compelled to sign noncompete agreements. In the valley, the significance of this provision became most apparent in the 1950s, when eight engineers defected from Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View to form Fairchild Semiconductor in nearby San Jose. In 1968, two of those engineers, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, would branch off yet again to establish another legendary valley company, Intel, where they were later joined by Andrew Grove.

Intel’s launch of its first microprocessor and its successful IPO, both in 1971, foreshadowed a promising decade for Silicon Valley. The following year marked the launch of Sunnyvale’s Atari, Inc. Atari’s product was a consumer electronics hit, but the functionality of its devices was limited to video games. In 1974 Steve Jobs worked there for several months as a video game designer. Shortly thereafter, alongside Steve Wozniak (Woz), Jobs’s high school chum and a UC Berkeley–trained engineer, Jobs pursued a vision for a personal computer (PC) with a much broader range of functionality than Atari’s products.

The product of a romance between a Syrian foreign student and his German American girlfriend, Steve Jobs was immediately given up for adoption upon his birth in 1950. To the great chagrin of Steve’s biological mother, neither Paul nor Clara Jobs had completed high school. So, Mr. and Mrs. Jobs had to sign a pledge that they would send the boy to college. When the time came, Steve was sent to Reed College, an expensive private liberal arts institution in Oregon. Yet as Jobs rather boldly stated in his 2005 commencement address to the graduates of Stanford University, “After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it.” He continued, “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out…So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out ok.”¹⁸

In stark contrast to Jobs, by the time Bill Gates dropped out of college toward the end of 1975, not only was he not wondering what to do with his life, but the twenty-year-old Harvard dropout was already doing it. Gates, along with his longtime friend Paul Allen, had recently won a significant contract providing software to MITS, one of the first microcomputer companies. In April of 1975, several months before Gates completed his fifth and what would turn out to be his final semester at Harvard, the two Seattleites founded Microsoft.

Especially for a young country, and more specifically the Pacific Northwest—one of America’s younger regions—Gates’s lineage was distinguished, even patrician. William Gates III is the great-grandson of J. W. Maxwell, a midwesterner who had established First National Bank, and the son of William Henry Gates II, who was among Seattle’s most prominent attorneys (now retired). Sent to the exclusive Lakeside School, Bill had distinguished himself as an excellent student, and when the school became one of the first to gain access to a mainframe connection, a thirteen-year-old Gates and his fifteen-year-old school chum Paul Allen got hooked on writing code.

Bill’s background and early life were a world away from Steve’s, but both of these entrepreneurs had placed themselves at the vanguard of the personal computer revolution at the same critical period. Apple, Inc., was founded in April of 1976, just one year after the establishment of Microsoft. Hand-built by Woz in the Jobs family’s Cupertino garage, the Apple I found a limited but enthusiastic audience. The Apple II, with a more powerful circuit board, care of Woz, and a more appealing all-in-one product, replete with a keyboard and a case, care of Jobs, was a massive success. IBM and the other traditional “mainframe” computer manufacturers were on notice that a revolution was under way.

By 1980 IBM was eager to compete in the burgeoning PC market. Microsoft, which had supplied its software successfully to hardware manufacturers in the late 1970s, was tapped to provide an operating system. Microsoft in turn decided to purchase the rights to such a system from a local company, Seattle Computer Products (SCP). A classic illustration of Gates’s shrewd negotiating skill, while Gates managed to obtain DOS from SCP for a total expense of only $75,000, when IBM asked to purchase the operating system from Microsoft, Gates refused. Instead, he compelled IBM to pay a licensing fee for each installation of DOS on every IBM PC. Moreover, Microsoft proceeded to sell software to the many knockoff PC manufacturers that were entering the market. By 1983 every third PC in the world was running Microsoft software.

In October of that year, Gates and Jobs shared a stage at an Apple conference held in Hawaii that featured promotions for the company’s upcoming Macintosh computer, slated for release in January of 1984, and running on Microsoft software. “To create a new standard,” Gates proclaimed, “takes something that’s really new and captures people’s imagination. And the Macintosh…is the only one that meets that standard.”¹⁹ Four years later, when Gates’s company (Allen had left in 1982) released Windows 2.0, Microsoft was accused of copying Macintosh’s attractive graphical user interface (GUI). In later years, the company would be challenged, both rhetorically and legally and from various corners, on grounds of anticompetitive practices—denunciations that Gates would vigorously deny.

As for Jobs, in the long term, the Mac would prove to be Apple’s signature product, at least until the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Nonetheless, the mid-1980s was a troubled time at the company, where former Pepsi CEO John Sculley, along with the Apple board, ousted Jobs from his own company in 1985. Jobs had proven himself a master of marketing, distribution, and consumer product design. Concurrently, his often-prickly management style generated resentment that would worsen when some Apple products, such as the first run of Macs, sold poorly. Although the firing was a terrible emotional blow, Jobs took the opportunity to become involved with other ventures. The animation studio Pixar, which Jobs helped develop for over twenty years, was the most significant of these. It was Pixar—not Apple—that made him a billionaire.

Gates, on the other hand, had been a billionaire since 1986, and by 2006, when Jobs sold Pixar to Disney for $7.6 billion, Gates had long been the wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of over $50 billion. The year 2006 was significant for Gates as well, being the one in which he decided to transition out of day-to-day management of Microsoft. In close collaboration with his wife Melinda, his friend Warren Buffett, and renowned philanthropists like the Irish rock star Bono, Gates has since devoted much of his time and some $30 billion of his wealth to philanthropic projects, including those designed to promote entrepreneurship in agriculture, the life sciences, and other areas that can impact the lives of the world’s ill and impoverished.

In 1997, Jobs was back at the helm of Apple, a company that was on the verge of collapse before he returned. Over the next decade, a series of extraordinary innovations would emerge from a reinvigorated Apple. These included the iMac, iTunes, the iPod, and the iPhone. “Life can be much broader,” Jobs once told a television interviewer, “once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”²⁰ Certainly, the daring entrepreneur who transformed computers, animation, music, and telecommunications lived by those words until his untimely death in 2011.

Both Jobs’s and Gates’s companies were fundamental to the PC revolution of the late twentieth century. By the time the Internet became widely available in the mid-1990s, PCs, the nodes of this network, were ubiquitous around the world, as was the Windows operating system. These commonalities, in turn, amplified the impact of the World Wide Web and made collaboration with people across the world just as quick and seamless as collaboration with people across the hall. As such, the work of Jobs, Gates, and the entrepreneurs behind Netscape and other late twentieth-century American companies helped lay the groundwork for the more globalized business world of the twenty-first century. Entrepreneurship has internationalized significantly in recent years and as the next chapter will discuss, has even expanded beyond our planet.