Technology Entrepreneurship and the Disruption of Ambition

By the late 18th century, armies are professionalising and something more like the modern state has emerged. Military command is the new ‘technology of ambition’ that the most ambitious people want to master. By 1800-ish, military command allowed an individual to say a word in Paris and move armies hundreds of miles away. It’s this ‘technology’ that allows the young Napoleon Bonaparte to progress from Corsican obscurity to French emperor.

Skip another couple of generations and finance emerges as the dominant ‘technology of ambition’. Cheques and memos written in New York reverberate around the world. Ambitious individuals who can harness finance are the emerging ‘masters of the universe’. Figures like J.P. Morgan in the late 19th century and Sidney Weinberg in the mid-20th become Wall St legends.

Finance’s dominance as the ‘default’ career path for ambitious people has been remarkably enduring [2]. In 2011, when we started Entrepreneur First, 60% of computer science graduates from one of the UK’s top universities went into finance. It remains the most popular destination for graduates of the world’s top business schools. As a ‘technology of scale’, the ability to direct vast capital flows to every corner of the planet is hard to beat.

But there’s at least one corner of the world where this default path doesn’t hold: Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley the most ambitious people want to build technology companies. My bet is that this will become the dominant ambition globally in the twenty first century.

Ambition and the Means of Production

Entrepreneurship built on digital technologies — software, the internet, mobile, artificial intelligence, etc — represents the most powerful ‘technology of ambition’ yet. There are three reasons for this: ever growing scale, ever growing scope and ever falling cost.

This is the most profound shift of all. Moving from the J.P. Morgan model of ambition to the Mark Zuckerberg model shifts the balance of power from capital to talent. Ambitious people have gone from writing cheques to writing code. Today the most ambitious individuals don’t own the means of production, if they can write code they are their own means of production (Marx would, perhaps, be surprised). This gives ambitious people unprecedented power.

This is why we see more and more of the world’s most ambitious individuals seeking to master today’s ‘technology of ambition’: technology entrepreneurship and the digital technologies that underpin it.

From Writing Cheques to Writing Code: J.P. Morgan and Mark Zuckerberg

New Ambitions, New Institutions

Each new ‘technology of ambition’ leads to new institutions that amplify the ambitions of people drawn to the technology.

To illustrate, let’s consider the three historical ‘technologies of ambition’ discussed above.

In each case, the institutions provide three things. One, a mechanism for acquiring the skills associated with the ‘technology of ambition’. Two, a social network of like-minded and like-skilled ambitious individuals. Three, a means to accelerate an individual’s next steps, such as providing privileged access to a set of resources or positions.

Crucially, these institutions play a role in taking ‘technologies of ambition mainstream. Initially the tool is restricted to a very small number of people and usually acquired by accident of birth or circumstance. We might call this ‘pre-mainstream’ — e.g. when only monks were literate.

After the institution develops, the technology becomes a tool that is accessible to a larger , albeit still elite, group. This group typically seeks to acquire knowledge of the technology deliberately and succeeds or fails on the basis of merit, more or less. At this stage, we can say the technology is ‘mainstream’ — e.g. by the time there was a literate professional class.

This is the transition that technology entrepreneurship now needs to go through. History suggests that, relative to today, many more ambitious individuals will seek to start technology companies in future.

BEYOND STARTUP ACCELERATORS

We’re at the early stages of the emergence of technology entrepreneurship as the ‘default career path’. The development of the related ‘magnet’ institutions is at a correspondingly early stage. I’m skeptical that startup accelerators are the answer. The unit they care about is the company, not the individual.

In that sense accelerators are the ‘pre-mainstream’ institutions of technology entrepreneurship. They assume that any good founder can and should form a team and develop a startup idea organically. This is implicitly conservative. It’s like believing in the 18th century that all the world’s great military leaders are probably the sons or nephews of great lords. The past might look like that, but it doesn’t mean the future will.

Most accelerators have a team/idea filter on entry. This means that they don’t, crucially, provide a path by which a sufficiently talented and ambitious individual can succeed on merit alone. They therefore exclude a large fraction — perhaps a majority — of the people who could be great technology entrepreneurs.

That, in short, is why we designed Entrepreneur First. We want to support the most talented and ambitious people even before they have a company . We’re entering an era where a large proportion of the world’s most ambitious individual will be founders. At Entrepreneur First we’re building an institution that amplifies their efforts from the very beginning of their journey.

As I like to say, the Napoleon of the 21st century won’t raise an army, they’ll start a startup — and we hope they’ll start it with us.

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[1] He wasn’t the first example — there were powerful non-nobles centuries before. But he’s a very striking one.

[2] ‘Default’ doesn’t mean ‘only’, of course . Hopefully it’s obvious that literacy, military command and finance are just examples, not a canonical list.

[3] Of course, just because a technology of ambition exists doesn’t make it a good thing. But we can all agree that it’s better for ambitious people to build valuable things than to invade countries.