The smaller the business, the better the odds that you are looking at something genuinely entrepreneurial.
Large corporations, of course, adore the vocabulary.
Their management teams like to imagine themselves as entrepreneurs: bold visionaries ploughing forward, taking risks, disrupting markets and leading their organizations into the future.
It is a flattering story.
It is also, very often, nonsense.
Large corporations are lumbering bureaucracies. Their professional managers inhabit a world of committees, reporting structures, compliance departments, strategic initiatives and carefully calibrated incentives. Many would struggle to recognize an entrepreneurial feeling if they ever experienced one.
They are a caste of high priests, anointed by other high priests and entrusted with the capital of millions of people they will never meet.
I have long argued that our company laws should reflect reality more honestly. Many publicly traded corporations operate according to structures and incentives that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the principles of centralized, bureaucratic systems we would otherwise describe as collectivist.
The ownership is dispersed.
The decision-making is concentrated.
The risks are socialized when things go badly.
The rewards remain highly concentrated when things go well.
Personally, I would rather lose every large corporation in the world than lose the small businesses.
That may sound extreme.
It is not.
A mom-and-pop store cannot hide behind layers of organizational obfuscation. There is no army of consultants between the owner and reality. The people running the business encounter the consequences of their decisions every single day.
They know when customers stop coming.
They know when costs rise.
They know when they have hired the wrong person, bought too much inventory or priced themselves out of the market.
There is nowhere to hide.
That is precisely why small businesses are so important.
When one fails, the damage is usually contained. A handful of people may lose their jobs. An owner may lose years of savings. A family may suffer.
It can be devastating to those involved.
But the failure does not normally threaten the architecture of an entire economy.
Large corporations are different.
When they fail spectacularly, the consequences can spread far beyond the company itself. And suddenly the argument begins: too many jobs are at stake. Too much systemic risk. Too much political pain.
So governments intervene.
Taxpayers provide the lifeboat.
Politicians are usually happy to oblige because unemployment is bad for election results, collapsing industries are bad for headlines, and allowing failure is considerably harder than promising to prevent it.
And so the system becomes self-reinforcing.
The larger the corporation, the more dangerous its failure becomes.
The more dangerous its failure becomes, the more likely the state is to rescue it.
The more likely the state is to rescue it, the less catastrophic risk appears to be to the people making the decisions.
That is how countries die slowly.
Not necessarily through one spectacular collapse, but through the gradual strangulation of the productive while the politically connected are coddled.
The small entrepreneur gets reality.
The large corporation gets a committee.
The small business gets bankruptcy.
The large corporation gets a rescue package.
And somewhere in between sits the taxpayer, paying for both.
The uncomfortable part is that we all participate in this.
We demand stability. We demand employment. We demand that governments prevent pain.
Then we wonder why economies become increasingly incapable of tolerating failure, experimentation and renewal.
Perhaps we should stop pretending that size is strength.
Sometimes size is merely a very expensive way of hiding weakness.