This got here with another episode of the History and Plug podcast.

Entrepreneurship is the engine of economic growth in the United States and essentially

every nation in the world, much more so than raw materials or the type of tax coordination

has.

But it didn't begin with Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or the ideas of Adam Smith.

Depending on how you look at the archaeological record, entrepreneurship goes back 9,000 years

where we have evidence of tribes creating beaming factories, transforming essentially

worthless stones in the ground, in the pieces of jewelry that they could trade for animal

skins, meat, and other things.

4,000 years ago, the first LLCs were set up in Mesopotamia and entrepreneurs were treated

as an essential part of these Bronze Age empires, creating a work culture kind of like Silicon

Valley.

But the late Bronze Age, trade colonies were set up throughout the Near East and if you

went to say, a, it tight city, you could find a neighborhood where Assyrians lived and

there would be the distribution endpoint of textiles coming from Babylonia, where they

would trade that from Anatolian copper and silver and send them back south.

To look at this nearly 10,000 year history of entrepreneurship and see what has stayed

the same but also what has changed over the millennia is Derek Lido, author of the book

The Entrepreneurs, The Relentless Quest for Value.

We look at how the archaeological record proves entrepreneurship eventually develops in

all urban cultures, how some groups of entrepreneurs have been hidden from history, who is often

immigrants, slaves, women and other marginalized people, and how parts of the modern world

...