The business creator is often celebrated for his audacity and his ability to leap into the void. Yet studies prove the opposite: founders who survive are the most cautious
We celebrate the entrepreneur for his courage to take risks. The data says something else: those who last are often the most cautious.
The heroic entrepreneur, we know the portrait. He leaves everything, burns his ships, stakes his house on a hunch. We have made it a virtue, a rite of passage almost. “Nothing risked, nothing gained.” Except that this portrait does not hold up to examination. Worse: it discourages exactly the people who would be most likely to succeed.
A study shows this quite bluntly. In 2014, two researchers, Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng, published a paper in the Academy of Management Journal with the direct title: “Should I Quit My Day Job?”. They follow a large sample of Americans who are starting out, and separate two populations: those who dive in full-time right away, and those who start while keeping their job, so-called “hybrid” entrepreneurship. The verdict leaves little room for doubt. Those who go through the hybrid phase before switching survive significantly better than those who dropped everything at once. Leaping into the void is not the condition for success. This is often what precedes the fall.
And that’s not the most annoying thing. The same researchers note that it is the most risk-averse, those who doubt themselves the most, who choose the hybrid path. So the profiles that the legend sends back to the ropes, the cautious, the hesitant, are precisely those who adopt the most solid strategy. The taste for risk that we erect as a marker of the founder? It would rather be the marker of someone who crashes quickly.
Adam Grant, who teaches at Wharton, drives the point home in Originals. Successful entrepreneurs are not lovers of danger. Most hate it and spend their time defusing it: they keep a net, they test before leaving everything, they spread their bets. Where we imagine a player, there is actually a methodical guy who reduces his exposure. The intuition behind this is simple. Keeping your job while you start means giving yourself the time to look, to learn, to correct, before committing to something you can no longer undo.
One question remains: if it is false, why does the myth hold up so well?
Because it suits just about everyone. It flatters those who have succeeded by repainting their initial comfort into bravery. It offers an easy explanation for failures: you didn’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t “dare” enough. And above all, it buries the most uncomfortable question, that of what we had behind us before we even started.
Because “taking a risk” means nothing in absolute terms. It all depends on what’s underneath. The one whose parents can advance the first thousand euros, host for free while it takes off, make the right contact or absorb a failure without drama, is not playing the same game as the one who has neither net, nor network, nor room for error. The first risks a sum; the second risks losing everything. The gesture is identical on paper, the real exhibition has nothing to do with it. When you have an inheritance, solvent parents, an address book that opens doors, the “jump into the void” is done above a trampoline. Without all that, it’s empty for good.
This is why boldness, presented as a character trait, is so often a disguised social position. We congratulate someone for their guts when we should recognize the room for maneuver they had. And we intimidate those who have a solid idea but not the cushion that goes with it, making them believe that what they lack is courage. What they lack, most often, is starting capital and a network that we do not choose, that we receive or not at birth.
And this sorting is paid for collectively. By making risk the supreme virtue, we select candidates in reverse: we reward those who can afford to lose, we dissuade those who have a solid idea but no margin. We take a signal, “this person has the means to risk”, for a skill. Nothing says, however, that the one who can lose without flinching will make a better company than the one who has to do with constraint. We thus deprive ourselves, without seeing it, of some of the best projects, simply because those behind them did not have the right starting point.
So what? First, stop selling the big jump as a necessary step. Starting without leaving everything is not lacking ambition; for most people, it’s just smarter. Then, change the criteria when evaluating a project leader: not their appetite for risk, but their ability to reduce it without lying. And then to say things: part of what we applaud as courage is starting capital which does not speak its name.
Courage, in entrepreneurship, is not about risking everything. It’s about building with constraint, without the net that others find normal to have. We can continue to applaud the leap into the void. Or we can start by asking who could afford to jump.
References: Joseph Raffiee & Jie Feng, “Should I Quit My Day Job? A Hybrid Path to Entrepreneurship”, Academy of Management Journal, 57(4), 2014, p. 936–963; Adam Grant, Originals, 2016.
