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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-Bcast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm here today with Dan McGinn, a senior editor at HBR, and author of an article in our September issue called Too Many Pivots Too Little Passion.

What's wrong with today's entrepreneurism?

Dan, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you.

So in the piece, you write that today's entrepreneurs aren't so much

building companies to last as they're building companies to be acquired by Google. What

led you to that conclusion? So in the piece I looked at four recent or upcoming books about

startups. Mostly they deal with tech startups. The best known of the books is

the Lean Startup by Eric Reese and all the books really describe

what's become the very popular way to do startups mostly tech startups which

is to hack together very quickly a very rudimentary product, get it out there in front of the customer as fast as you can,

and use that feedback to change it, even if changing it means moving to a completely

different kind of business. So it's the changeability aspect that makes these

companies seem much different than the companies we saw a generation ago.

It seems like a lot of these companies will start one thing, completely change to something

else, and have a third idea going within 10 days, and there seems a little bit of a

flightiness to it at times. So my question though to you is there anything wrong

...