Entrepreneur in 1602: The VOC invents the public company

Do you need a degree to become an entrepreneur? No. Entrepreneurship is unlicensed everywhere; no country requires a qualification to register a company. In practice most successful founders have education and, more importantly, industry experience: a large US Census study published in 2018 found the average founder of the fastest-growing new firms was 45 at founding. Customers and investors, not examiners, decide who continues.

How do entrepreneurs actually make money? Three ways: a salary they set themselves, which is often minimal in the early years; profit distributions once the business earns more than it spends; and equity — the ownership stake whose value is realized only if the company is sold, listed or pays dividends. Most entrepreneurial wealth comes from the third, which most founders never reach.

Across the US and most OECD countries, roughly half of new employer firms survive five years, and about a third reach ten. The often-quoted "90% of startups fail" describes venture-style outcomes, where anything short of a large exit counts as failure. Plain survival is far more common than the mythology suggests — and still far from guaranteed.