Unicorns, Gazelles, and Other Distractions on the Way to Understanding Real Entrepreneurship in America

Abstract

Dazed and confused by the wild hype surrounding “gazelles” and “unicorns,” entrepreneurship researchers have focused on the “black swans” of the entrepreneurial world, even though IPOs and venture capital financing of firms are extremely rare events. Despite the rarity of IPOs and obtaining venture capital, entrepreneurship conferences and journals have been filled with papers on various aspects of the process of “going public” and “VC networks.” Fortunately, in the middle of the Silicon Valley mania, other scholars have been paying attention to the more mundane aspects of business start-ups—the ordinary business starts, numbering in the hundreds of thousands for businesses with employees. The purpose of this article is to address what we believe to be scholars’ misplaced attention on the extreme and their neglect of the mundane in the study of entrepreneurship. Correcting the misperception that has been introduced through selection biases favoring growing and profitable firms will give scholars and policymakers a more accurate and policy-relevant picture of entrepreneurship in the 21st century.