Merchants are older than the word. Schumpeter named a function. Y Combinator (2005) and a thousand courses named a style. The hero biography is still the dominant folk theory.
The timeline below follows dated arguments and institutions, not a national myth of genius and not a group ranking.
Origin
1911 Schumpeter to 21st c. startup school · Austria / US campuses / global markets — Merchants are older than the word. Schumpeter named a function. Y Combinator (2005) and a thousand courses named a style. The hero biography is still the dominant folk theory.
Timeline
- Schumpeter’s Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung
The entrepreneur as new combinations.
- Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship
Alertness as the Austrian complement.
- Madam C.J. Walker’s company
A scaled Black women-to-women venture under Jim Crow — a file popular books still flatten.
- Honda Motor founded
A postwar engineering-commercial path, not a dorm-room myth.
- Zhang Yin’s paper recycling
A later global-scale Chinese venture file.
- Sarasvathy’s effectuation paper
Expert entrepreneurs’ logic as a research object.
- Y Combinator begins
Batch-produced founders as a style.
- Lean-startup export
Ries as a popular method — not a talent theory.
- Global accelerator copy
A form that travels better than the legal and capital context.
- Creator-economy false positives
Visibility without a firm.
Eras
- Function — Schumpeter — A role in capitalism.
- Alertness — Kirzner — Seeing what others miss.
- Biography — Walker to Honda — Files, not laws.
- Batch school — YC / lean — A style industrialised.
- Attention economy — Creators — A new false-positive.
Shifts
- From function to personality late 20th c. — The hero turn.
- From means to pitch-deck goals 2005– — And Sarasvathy’s pushback.
- From firm to personal brand 2020s — Visibility without inventory.
Entrepreneurial talent: keep the dates visible. Names of talents are younger than the work they try to capture.