Luck, Faith and God: Key Factors to Success, Say Entrepreneurs in New Study

The report, Anatomy of Entrepreneur II, details what makes entrepreneurs successful and what they believe stops others from joining their ranks. The first set of findings from the report was released this summer. The latest key results include:

• Company founders said that their strongest success factors were experience, management and luck.
• 73% of entrepreneurs cited “good fortune” as an important success factor.
• Many entrepreneurs emphasized in the written portion of the survey that faith and God were keys to their success.
• Entrepreneurs feel that failures were as or more important than their successes. A full 40% of founders felt that learning from failures was “extremely important” to their eventual success in business.
• Entrepreneurs said that a university education and business networks aren’t as important as expected.
• Prior work experience is the most relevant factor to a successful business, with 96% of founders considering it important.
• Authors indicate that this underscores a finding of the previous paper showing that most successful entrepreneurs started their first business at 40 years old, and most had at least 6-10 years of business experience.

Anatomy of Entrepreneur is a comprehensive report distributed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and conducted by Krisztina Holly from the University of Southern California, Vivek Wadhwa from Duke University and Raj Aggarwal from University of Akron. Research is based on a survey of 549 company founders in a variety of industries, including aerospace and defense, computer and electronics, health care and services.

The study explores company founders’ opinions and observations about their own trajectory and what influenced the success or failure of their businesses. According to authors of the study, by understanding what entrepreneurs think and believe, insights into how to better support entrepreneurs and create societal, political, and economic conditions can more efficiently foster entrepreneurship.
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1507384)

Anatomy of an Entrepreneur Part I

This research paper provides some insights into the motivations of founders of high-growth companies, as well as their socio- economic, educational, and familial backgrounds. The researchers found that technology entrepreneurs are most likely to come from middle-class backgrounds, to have parents who are less educated than they are, and to be married with children when they launch their first companies. Their primary motivations for launching a company are financial and emotional. They wanted to build wealth and had a business idea on which they wanted to capitalize. Many said they had always wanted their own companies some day. (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1431263)

Contact: Elisa Wiefel at (213) 821-6063 or wiefel@usc.edu