Wharton Professor: The 7 Hidden Types of Entrepreneurs | with Lori Rosenkopf

Afford Anything

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Entrepreneurship, Business, Investing

4.6 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#634: Picture this: you're 26 years old, fresh out of Wharton, and you decide to start a business with two friends. You spend years building a digital marketing firm that eventually works with Dollar Shave Club and Madison Reed. You bootstrap the entire thing without taking a dime of venture capital funding. That's exactly what one Wharton graduate did — and his story represents the reality of entrepreneurship that most people never hear about. Lori Rosenkopf, a management professor at Wharton Business School and head of Venture Labs, joins us to shatter the biggest myths about starting a business. The Mark Zuckerberg college dropout story? It's not just rare — it's misleading. Research shows that the most successful entrepreneurs, those in the top 0.1 percent of venture-backed firms, average late 30s to early 40s when they start their companies. Many continue launching businesses into their 50s and 60s. Your age and corporate experience isn't holding you back from entrepreneurship — it's actually giving you an advantage. Rosenkopf breaks down seven different types of entrepreneurs, from disruptors who overturn entire industries to bootstrappers who build profitable businesses using their own resources. You'll hear about a founder who disrupted the hair color industry in her 50s with Madison Reed, and a banker who built an entire financial services division inside Square. We cover the rise of direct-to-consumer brands in 2013, why 80 percent of entrepreneurs are bootstrappers, and how artificial intelligence is creating new opportunities for people to start businesses without massive upfront investments. Rosenkopf explains her "six Rs" of entrepreneurial thinking: reason, recombination, relationships, resources, resilience, and results. She argues that most people already think entrepreneurially without realizing it — even parents who optimize their family routines are solving problems through innovation. We explore the world of "intrapreneurs" — people who build new businesses within established companies — and discuss acquisition entrepreneurship, where people buy existing small businesses instead of starting from scratch. Whether you want to start a side hustle, position yourself for a promotion, or eventually launch your own company, Rosenkopf's framework shows multiple paths to creating value through innovation. Timestamps: Note: Timestamps will vary on individual listening devices based on dynamic advertising run times. The provided timestamps are approximate and may be several minutes off due to changing ad lengths. (0:00) Entrepreneurship myths (1:28) Data on successful entrepreneur ages (2:10) Seven entrepreneur archetypes (3:09) Defining entrepreneurship through value creation (5:27) The disruptor model (8:13) Direct-to-consumer origins (11:13) Bootstrapper (14:03) Transitioning from employee to bootstrapper (18:38) AI's impact on entrepreneurship (28:27) Social entrepreneur (35:31) Technology commercializer (39:45) The Funder (43:12) The Acquirer (58:06) Intrapreneurship (1:03:12) Finding your entrepreneurial calling (1:14:40) Six Rs of entrepreneurial mindset (1:19:50) More information Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a myth around entrepreneurship that entrepreneurs are like that Mark Zuckerberg archetype.
0:05.4	They are college dropouts who get lots of funding and then go on to become megastars.
0:11.7	But that's not actually what the data shows.
0:14.3	And in fact, the world of entrepreneurship is much bigger, more varied, and older than you might expect.
0:23.8	To discuss that today, we're joined by Lori Rosenkopf, a professor of management at Wharton Business School and the head of Venture Labs.
0:30.5	Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything.
0:35.6	This show covers five pillars. Financial Psychology,
0:38.6	increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double-eye fire.
0:43.4	And today we're going to talk about the letter E, entrepreneurship. Welcome, Lori. Hi, Paula. It's
0:48.9	great to be here. Thank you for joining us. Can you start by breaking the myth of entrepreneurship?
0:56.1	I'd love to do that, Paul. We look at our alumni and see them following many, many different paths.
1:02.6	We show a diverse set of role models, diversity in industry, in stage of life, demographically as well.
1:12.9	The data actually shows the top 0.1% of entrepreneurs are over the age of 45 at the time
1:20.1	that they start their company? Yes, one of my colleagues, Danny Kim, who's a young professor
1:24.7	in our management department, worked with several other folks.
1:27.9	And they did study venture-back firms, as you said, the top point one percent.
1:32.3	And they looked at the age of the founders.
1:34.4	So these are incredibly successful firms.
1:38.0	On average, the founders were late 30s, early 40s, many of them going into their 50s and 60s.
1:45.9	So again, that myth that we see, I shouldn't say myth, but those anecdotes, those stories that we see, like a Snapchat founder, are exceedingly rare.
1:55.3	In your research, you've profiled seven different archetypes of different types of entrepreneurs.
2:02.6	And I'd like to go through that, these seven types of entrepreneurs.
	...

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