It’s getting even harder to form companies that are truly built on world changing ideas. It’s because of wealth shaming. We view the rich as crooks, as people that gamed the system to be billionaires. Given, entrepreneurs don’t get the red carpet that athletes, singers or movie stars get. This is even as they make the products we use everyday, create clean decent rewarding jobs that pay taxes to the government to ensure efficient services are provided, and also ensure high upward social economic mobility. It’s harder for a founder to raise money to finance her ideas without losing a significant stake of her company. Anything less than 20 percent ownership by a founder is a screw up by investors.
So, how wealthy should the richest man in the world be? It depends on what value they are giving to society, and what value they are taking from society. In socialist countries, they believe that the entrepreneur is taking more from society so they should be taxed a great deal. For instance, you can never put a worth on a teacher who trained the workers so you get maximum productivity from them. The government funds research which then helps to create new ideas that will create wealth. For instance, the internet was a US government project and has created thousands of billionaires. For instance, should we compensate Tim Bernes Lee who invented the hyper text mark up language, html, that allowed the internet to be visible through the world wide web, www.
Inventors don’t usually know what to do with their ideas. It’s why for instance they pursue Physics and not electrical engineering. Roughly just 2 percent of inventions become useful business ideas that can create jobs for people. It’s why innovators usually succeed where inventors fail for an innovator solves a problem that the society needs and then uses the invention as a technology enabler. Many people think for you to found Microsoft or Tesla or Google you must invent that technology. That’s actually not true. All you need to do is to link a problem in society with a technology that will help you solve that problem. The richest man Elon Musk is not an engineer but he founded Tesla, Space X, and PayPal. For creative geniuses then, they must link the technology, the invention whether a product or business process, and then link it with a problem that needs to be addressed. We have so many problems in the world that needs to be solved, and all of those are money making ventures if you provide the solution to that problem.
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