Entrepreneur in 1765: Wedgwood manufactures demand

The person who starts the company — spotting the gap, bearing the risk and answering for payroll, from Assyrian caravan financiers to venture-backed founders. "Entrepreneur" comes from the French entreprendre, "to undertake," and it was an Irish-born banker in Paris, Richard Cantillon, who first gave the word its economic meaning: someone who buys at a certain price to sell at an uncertain one, living on the difference and eating the loss. His essay, published in 1755, still describes the job better than most business books — the entrepreneur is the person in the economy who volunteers to carry uncertainty.

It is the only profession on this site with no license, no degree requirement and no governing body anywhere on earth. The exam is the market, and it fails roughly half of all new firms within five years in most OECD countries. It is also far larger than the startup mythology suggests: the International Labour Organization counts nearly half the world's workers as self-employed, most of them running necessity-driven micro-businesses, not venture-backed companies.

This page follows the undertaking itself from Assyrian caravan financiers and the medieval commenda contract to the Dutch East India Company, Schumpeter's "creative destruction" and Y Combinator's demo day. It covers how people actually get in and get funded, what a founder's day and craft look like, eight founders from six countries who built things that outlived them, and how much of the job AI can realistically absorb.