Steve Blank on spending tax money generating entrepreneurship

Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank wrote an extremely important post on his blog a couple of days ago:

Preparing for an overseas assignement he spent a full week reviewing several countries’ attempts to kick-start entrepreneurship.  After poring through stacks of reports, white papers and position papers, he came to a couple of conclusions:

1) They sure killed a ton of trees

2) With one noticeable exception, governmental entrepreneurship policies and initiatives appear to be less than optimal, with capital deployed inefficiently (read “They would have done better throwing the money in the street.”) Why? Because they haven’t defined the basics:

What’s a startup?  Who’s an entrepreneur? How do the ecosystems differ for each one? What’s the role of public versus private funding?

There are six distinct organizational paths for entrepreneurs: lifestyle business, small business, scalable startup, buyable startup, large company, and social entrepreneur. All of the individuals who start these organizations are “entrepreneurs” yet not understanding their differences screws up public policy because the ecosystem in supporting each type is radically different.

For policy makers, the first order of business is to methodically think through which of these entrepreneurial paths they want to help and grow.

Read the full blog post here: Why governments don’t get startups