The focus of my book Impact is on entrepreneurial teams — all of the values, principles, and practices are offered to help leaders build high-performing teams to disrupt the status quo. But why that focus?
The obvious answer is circular. If you want to do something traditionally entrepreneurial, such as starting a business, then team creativity, innovation, and problem-solving are essential. But there is another answer that matters more. I believe the future of human work across all fields will be dominated in impact by entrepreneurial teams. There are a few trends that drive this.
Since the Internet hit the browser, software has eaten the world,[1] increasing competition. Industry after industry has been disrupted by the forces of abundance, low marginal costs, virality, and network effects.[2] These forces have been repeatedly harnessed to transform pipeline businesses (production and distribution) into multi-sided platforms (e.g., marketplaces of artists and fans). In so doing, they have replaced historic gatekeepers (e.g., music labels) with marketplace competition (e.g., Spotify and YouTube).[3] Beyond an initial gold rush, these marketplaces ultimately sort participants into power curves of outcomes—a small group of big winners composed of those most talented and most entrepreneurial, and a large group of lower-reward participants who are at least no longer blocked by gatekeepers. [4] For every Taylor Swift, there are millions of artists with hundreds or thousands of fans. Entrepreneurial competition is becoming the norm.
Second, over the long term, anything that can be replaced by a computer or a robot will be replaced by a computer or a robot. Many old jobs will be destroyed, many new ones will be created, and society will be disrupted. And while the world will likely never be free of programmatic work (high repeatability through prescribed micro instructions), more work will migrate to what is most human—working with others to bring about the world we want to see. At early Roblox, for example, we regularly automated programmatic tasks, from self-healing engineering systems to in-product creator tools. This automation allowed us to focus more on human activities, such as engaging directly with our community, and on realizing our vision for a new world of imaginative play. Work like that relies on building teams to create, innovate, and solve problems. Such non-programmatic work belies command-and-control leadership, requiring instead environments that fuel by purpose, live by values, unlock autonomy, and institutionalize mastery. Entrepreneurial collaboration is becoming the norm.
Third, the software that is eating the world is also making it easier to start new teams and collaborate with people around the globe. And the pace of these changes is stunning. In just a few hours in the United States, for example, you can create articles of incorporation online, file them with state and federal authorities, open a bank account, issue credit cards, secure a domain name, set up email and cloud documents, and start creating intellectual property with others. This was weeks of work just two decades ago. Software has also made it easier to work with people remotely and integrate both full-time and ad hoc contributors. Consider the host of online tools now available, such as video conferencing, asynchronous messaging, teaching, project management, design, programming, software operations, advertising, analytics, and artificial intelligence. These tools break down barriers of distance, amplify human effort, reduce operating friction, and allow teams to focus more on innovation and less on logistics. As a result, the average size of founding teams has steadily decreased to about four people.[5] Entrepreneurial collaboration is becoming easier, and entrepreneurial teams are getting smaller.
Fourth, the latest generation to enter the workforce seems to be the most purpose-driven[6] and civic-minded[7] since perhaps the Greatest Generation. And there are good reasons for that. Looking backward, the last ten years of political polarization, international conflict, economic inequality, inflation, and COVID-19’s disruption and isolation have led to an important conclusion, particularly if this is the bulk of your historical experience. The conclusion is that life is precious, people matter, and the system is not entirely working. Looking forward, the disruptions facing society over the next fifty years from technological advancements, policy choices, and natural disasters, among others, are formidable. The next fifty years must be about proactively disrupting harmful trends before those trends negatively disrupt society. Successful disruption is always entrepreneurial—seeing the world in a new way, solving problems that others claim are intractable, and building a movement for change. Entrepreneurial disruption must become the norm to ensure that disruption is something we do, not just experience.
Today, the term entrepreneurial team is often associated with tech startups, and for a good reason. Technology has had a profoundly positive effect on our world since 1870, when technological advancement outpaced population growth for the first time in history.[8] And technology will continue to impact our society moving forward. But technology in and of itself does not change the world—the people who create and realize technology change the world, specifically entrepreneurial teams inspired by a shared purpose to drive an idea from belief to impact. Entrepreneurial teams are doing much more than building technology. They are advancing science, assembling multidisciplinary teams around the globe to better understand our bodies, our world, and our stars. They are advancing policy, building coalitions across the aisle and across the oceans. They are advancing the health and well-being of communities through foundations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), building distributed teams of community members, employees, volunteers, and donors. Entrepreneurial teams across a broad spectrum of endeavors have already had outsized impact, and that impact is growing.
Consider the collective impact of just a very short list of teams with entrepreneurial roots[9]: Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon in consumer and business Internet infrastructure; Genentech, CRISPR, and Moderna in biotech; Change.org, Benetech, GoFundMe, and Kiva in community services; Tesla and Beyond Meat in sustainability; and most recently, OpenAI, Midjourney, and Anthropic in artificial intelligence, not to mention all the social and media apps we use every day. In addition to the profound innovation they deliver, entrepreneurial teams also contribute to the gross domestic product (GDP) and create jobs. The percentage of public companies that were originally venture-backed, for example, has steadily grown in number from near 0 percent in 1970 to almost 20 percent in 2013.[10] And in terms of job creation, businesses with 500 employees or less accounted for over 99 percent of all teams in 2019, and small businesses have accounted for 62 percent of the net new jobs created since 1994.[11]
So why is my book about entrepreneurial teams? First, they are becoming the norm—not everywhere all the time but increasingly so, particularly for disruptive endeavors. Second and more significantly, entrepreneurial teams are a powerful means to make the world a better place. Whether you are starting a company, leading a team, advocating for change, or just managing your career, you will need to create, innovate, and solve problems repeatedly in order to have a real impact on the world around you. You will also need to build teams to do those same things, whether they are large or small, formal or informal, collocated or distributed, employees or community. If your goal is to disrupt and innovate, having an entrepreneur’s mindset can amplify your success. Great entrepreneurial teams believe, act urgently, take initiative, do hard things, experiment, learn, bounce back, adapt, and focus. Great entrepreneurial teams have impact.
Entrepreneurial teams are shaping the future of work, innovation, and social progress. Software and automation have lowered the barriers to collaboration, enabling smaller, more agile teams to form and create at scale. At the same time, a new generation of purpose-driven professionals is fueling disruption across every domain—from technology to policy to community impact. Success today depends less on individual brilliance and more on aligned, values-driven teams that act with urgency, creativity, and resilience to turn belief into impact.
In your current work, where might a more entrepreneurial mindset unlock greater creativity or impact? How might you better align your team’s daily actions with its deeper mission or impact? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
[1] Mark Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Andreessen Horowitz, August 20, 2011, https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/.
[2] Brutally short definitions: abundance – Internet software brings millions of books to your fingertips, not just hundreds; low marginal cost – the cost to host one new song on Spotify is near zero compared to the tens of millions of songs already hosted and product development already invested; virality – word-of-mouth marketing; network effects – each new person added to a platform makes the product better for everyone (e.g., early on, new creators on a platform improve life for all creators because more creators attract a larger audience).
[3] Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary, Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016).
[4] In theory, the replacement of gatekeepers with entrepreneurial competition is positive—lower barriers to entry, larger pools of participants, market forces over individual biases, transfer of economic rents held by gatekeepers to creators, and an overall larger economic pie. In practice, not every business is amenable to platforms as others are, and those that are amenable are not always implemented with rigor (as described in the Platform Revolution, for example). In these cases, the democratization of an industry can become more of a race to the bottom of commodification, with a few at the top enjoying most of the benefits. As The Who say, “Meet the new boss.”
[5] Akbar Sadeghi, “Business Employment Dynamics by Age and Size of Firms,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2022, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2022/business-employment-dynamics-by-age-and-size/home.htm.
[6] David Lidsky, “Managing Gen Z: Fast Company’s 142-Point Guide for Leaders,” Fast Company, July 10, 2023, https://www.fastcompany.com/90918427/managing-gen-z-fast-companys-142-point-guide-for-leaders.
[7] Youth voter turnout in 2020 was the largest since 1972, exceeding 50 percent (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/984745/youth-voter-turnout-presidential-elections-us/). Turnout in the 2022 midterm elections, while less than in 2018, was still the second-highest in the last three decades (source: https://circle.tufts.edu/2022-election-center#youth-turnout-second-highest-in-last-three-decades). Why? “As compared to older generations, more Zoomers say they voted because of timely issues that will shape our society for years to come” (source: https://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org/learning/gen-z-post-election-research).
[8] J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2022).
[9] A list developed in tandem with ChatGPT and Google search.
[10] Ilya A. Strebulaev and Will Gornall, “How Much Does Venture Capital Drive the U.S. Economy?” Stanford Business, October 21, 2015, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-much-does-venture-capital-drive-us-economy.
[11] “Facts & Data on Small Business and Entrepreneurship,” SBE Council, accessed May 30, 2024, https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/.
