Enlightened Dictators

If we fund an early stage startup company today and it’s hugely successful, it will be coming into its own in 2025. Ponder that for a moment. That’s how our business—and entrepreneurship—really works. With all of the excitement around entrepreneurship in the past few years, there has been a lot of shorter term thinking. I’m seeing and hearing a lot more of it these days. This is dangerous, especially for founders. I was in Boston at the end of May and had three separate experiences in one day.

“The Soviet Union I left behind was a dictatorship, but the workplace was a democracy; America may be free, but the workplace is a dictatorship,” said Len Erlikh after I hired him at First Boston (now Credit Suisse First Boston) in 1986. Being of the Jewish faith, he had fled the U.S.S.R.’s religious persecution. Erlikh’s words have always stuck with me. It is true that in capitalism, the workplace is mostly autocratic.

Over the past week, 16 entrepreneurs and over 50 mentors and specialists have gathered at Project Literacy Lab to solve key challenges related to illiteracy. During the program, experts in design thinking, marketing/branding, investment, rapid-prototyping, and social impact share their insights and perspectives in the collective goal of closing the global literacy gap by 2030.