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Notre Dame's Dr. Michael H. Morris on 45 years of research, the students who built businesses out of nothing, and why the way we teach entrepreneurship fails almost everyone. Recorded ahead of Shoulders of Giants, October 8, 2026, World Trade Center Seattle.
Private conversations with the people whose work the rest of us stand on. From reSpace, hosted by Katrina Romatowski.
Katrina Romatowski (00:33):
Excellent, thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Michael Morris. I'm really excited for our upcoming Shoulders of Giants with you. As we prepare for that, take me back. So before Notre Dame, before the McKenna Center, before the 80 steps, what was the moment you realized the way we teach entrepreneurship was broken?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (00:52):
I've never seen entrepreneurship as simply a vehicle to get rich, or that it's about wealth. To me, entrepreneurship is always about the little guy, the underdog, the person who the odds are against, who creates something of their own and creates their own path.
And in that sense, it's like the great equalizer.
Katrina Romatowski (01:18):
love
that you said that.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (01:19):
I, as we've built entrepreneurship programs and ultimately what we're doing now, our focus has been more on entrepreneurship as that. I hesitate to say it because the word is so abused and overused, entrepreneurship as empowerment.
Katrina Romatowski (01:38):
Yeah, it really is. And the great equalizer, it is. It's something, it's the only way for someone who has no other, may have no other access to actually create their own, create their own endeavor and create freedom, right? And not only for themselves, but for the people who are a part of what they're building. And you've built three university entrepreneurship
programs ranked nationally in the top ten. And then that's an extraordinary academic career on its own. But then at some point you turn your focus to people who will never set foot in a university. And so what happened?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (02:22):
So it wasn't a turning at some point. We had embedded in our whole approach to entrepreneurship education these principles. And as we built these programs, we found that one of the best ways for students to learn about entrepreneurship is to see it and experience it by people who had more obstacles to overcome and more.
barriers against them. So in all these programs that we built, had special initiatives for women entrepreneurs, disabled veterans who were trying to
Native Americans and ultimately people.
It wasn't a switch so much as a decision at a certain point to say, I'm just going to do this.
Katrina Romatowski (03:10):
So tell me about a specific person, someone who came in with nothing, no savings, no business plan, no network, just adversity and a dream, and what happened to them?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (03:23):
Yeah, there's a bunch of those stories. And so often, I don't even appreciate the whole story. I'll be talking to an entrepreneur who I may have worked with for a few years.
She will say, and I didn't know this, while I was in jail for.
never forget the day I thought I knew everything about this one entrepreneur.
We were in some other forum and she just, actually I had her in class on the university campus. she said, yeah, my daughter and I were dumpster diving two months before I started the business. And that's sort of a whole different, know, the students in that room see whatever the lesson was in a very different light.
I don't know, one of my favorite examples is a woman who, she spent about five years, she was a teacher's aide in school.
That was how she made money, but she spent five years collecting bicycles and fixing them up until she had 35 bicycles. And she opened a bicycle rental business. And this is in South Bend, Indiana, where Notre Dame is.
Her timing couldn't have been better because the name of it, it's called Lime or something. They had just pulled
Katrina Romatowski (04:44):
Lime scooters and Lime bikes.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (04:47):
out a South Bend because they weren't making enough money. So her timing was great. And her angle, her sort of uniqueness was she would bring the bike to you and then come pick it up. And so.
We worked with her. The students assisted her. She launched. She built the business. we're in South Bend, Indiana, so there are lot of months. We're a lot of bicycle activity going on in the winter. But she learned about scheduling and learned that she started partnering with hotels because then they would hold her bikes and then rent the bikes.
guests who were like in South Bend for the weekend, so let's take a bike ride. And she, after a few years, she was in our first cohort, actually. She called me one day and said, in my whole life, she was probably 37, 38 years old.
I just wanted you to know this is the first year I've ever made more than $20,000.
You know, and so that's why we do the program. We also have the ability. So our whole program is based on these 80 steps to a financially sustainable business. And we got some support to provide these small microgrants to entrepreneurs who finished 25 of our steps while they're in the program. A step could be opening a business bank account or creating a logo or setting up
Facebook.
So she was one of the first to win one of these $2,000 micrograms.
And she quickly took the $2,000 micro-grant and bought a trailer to haul her bikes around.
It's just stories like that.
Katrina Romatowski (06:48):
And so obviously this is a game changer for her, for her family, for her children and what her children know is possible. What do you think the greater impact is for the community to see someone and the students and you, right?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (07:04):
Yeah, there's a lot of different benefits. One of the challenges with people in poverty and disadvantage, and especially people of color, is they don't grow up with entrepreneurial role models. If they have role models, it's usually like their mom.
sports figures.
or entrepreneurs or not.
So this woman is a role model now for her community. What we find is probably what inspires me more than anything is we ask these entrepreneurs, why are you doing this? Why are you starting this business? And occasionally, you I want to make money. But that's rarely what they say. And there are other things, so I don't want to work for the man.
Katrina Romatowski (07:56):
anymore.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (07:57):
I
want more freedom. You mentioned freedom early on.
Poverty more than anything takes away choice. can't go where you want to go, can't drive what you want to drive, you can't wear what you want to wear, can't eat what you want to eat. Choice.
Katrina Romatowski (08:15):
You can have the conversations you want to have. You don't even have the words for it.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (08:19):
Right and
and so it really is all about
people having more choice. Entrepreneurship is the vehicle for doing that.
Sorry, I lost the gist of the.
Katrina Romatowski (08:34):
Yeah, well, it's not just the difference that it makes for the individual, but the community, the students.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (08:41):
When I ask them what drives you, what motivates you, the number one answer, and it's not just our program in South Bend, Indiana. It's the program here in Seattle. It's the program in Atlanta, the program in Bakersfield, California. And I've gotten to visit a lot of these cities. They will tell you, I'm doing this to make my community better. And you go, well, that sounds.
like a politically correct thing to say. And so at one point, I probed with a few of the entrepreneurs. And one guy said, you don't understand. I want to do well enough to hire people who look like me, to hire people come from where I
And I asked one entrepreneur in particular, what do you really mean you want to help?
said, well, her business was a daycare. She said, I had my first baby when I was 16.
She had three or four kids. It's a tough life, working two part-time jobs, raising four kids, trying to start a business. And she said, and I grew up with a lot of women like me. And they don't have choice. They can't do things. don't have places to take care of their kids. So I'm starting this daycare.
So they do. And so then I got it in terms of it's not just a do good thing for my neighborhood. It's what I grew up with and how my venture can change that.
Katrina Romatowski (10:12):
That's powerful. Yeah, the it, right? And so when we were talking about shoulders of giants, right, it's not just having the ability, but the people who will and are capable and will do something, and you're equipping those people to be capable.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (10:28):
Well, there's a lot of stereotypes when it comes to this kind of entrepreneurship. Because this isn't glamorous. This isn't the next Uber. It's somebody opening a home health care business or a barbecue.
dresses, know, a hair salon.
As a society, we have become so enamored with the other that we forget that these businesses are the backbone of our country, of our economy. And when they do succeed, they're not moving to Austin, Texas or Silicon Valley. They're embedded in the
So they may not create 500 jobs, but they matter. And they make a big difference. We look at, especially the poor, when they start businesses. The assumption is, the person is starting a business out of sheer necessity.
So they're not driven by entrepreneurship. They're driven by, I need more money. Here's a way to make some more money. And nothing could be further from the truth. These are entrepreneurs that are not doing it. So they use the term necessity entrepreneurship. Like, you're only starting a business because you have to. We find that there is no such thing as necessity entrepreneurship with most of these entrepreneurs. There's some that happens.
They see opportunity. They have a dream. Their goals are...
very real and not simply tied to, I need a side gig to augment the little money I'm making from this job that
in
And so.
Or this program is spread now to, as of last Friday, 60 cities around the country and around the world. And the
recurrent sort of messages as we've expanded the program is the commonality we find in every one of these cities is that they have dreams, that they have, and these are nuts and bolts businesses, but they have a passion for what they're trying to do, that this is what they want to do. If they had to keep a job while they started a business, in most cases it's how do I get to the point where I can leave the job full time?
to do the business. So it's not about necessity. And what I start to say is one of the smallest cities of the 60 is South Bend, Indiana, our program. And we have the biggest program. We serve 70 entrepreneurs a year. And you think in a town the size of South Bend, if you have 70 a year, in two or three years, you run out of entrepreneurs. We don't even have to market the program anymore.
And we have 150 people on a wait list. So there's this incredible reservoir of dreams.
to do something through entrepreneurship.
Katrina Romatowski (13:35):
So maybe it still is out of necessity, but the necessity isn't financial. The necessity, it's a necessity for the human spirit, right? For the expression of themselves, for the expression of their dreams to create the community, to do better, and to have the life, be able to have a meaningful say in the life that they're creating for themselves, their community, their businesses, and the people around them.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (14:03):
Yeah, and the other reason that this kind of program is so important is, so we're seeing between 30 and 35%, the goal of the program is to help the entrepreneur reach, get the business to a point of financial sustainability.
And we're seeing between 30 and 35 % through that. Which in the entrepreneurship
Katrina Romatowski (14:26):
incredible.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (14:28):
space is pretty cool.
But I just can't emphasize that.
benefit so transcends whether they improve their economic
Because if you start a business...
And you can hang in there. And these entrepreneurs do hang in You're developing a whole skill set. You're learning how to set a price. You're learning how to keep the books. You're learning how to manage quality. So we have a lady who starts a kettle corn, popcorn flavored, five or six flavors of kettle corn.
And she shows up at pop-up events and public markets and sells by the bag.
Six flavors. Six flavors.
And she's routinely bringing more of the flavors she likes the most to these events. And routinely selling out of these flavors and not selling the flavors that she brings the most of.
Katrina Romatowski (15:35):
you
Dr. Michael H. Morris (15:35):
Well, she learns inventory man. Learns how
Katrina Romatowski (15:38):
.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (15:38):
to manage inventory. So the skill set, the sense of they develop an identity.
I'm a black entrepreneur, I'm a woman entrepreneur, I'm a whatever, fill in the blank entrepreneur, but it becomes part of their identity. They develop a voice to the community that they didn't have. People will answer the phone when they call. So these other benefits.
Katrina Romatowski (16:05):
and discovering their own voice in the process, right? Wow. That's powerful, too. I love all of this. So you broke the entrepreneurship journey into 80 steps. it's not follow your passion. It's 80 specific concrete steps. So why 80? And why a roadmap instead of motivation?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (16:31):
Well, 80 sounds better than 82.
Katrina Romatowski (16:33):
Hahaha!
Dr. Michael H. Morris (16:34):
So, but
Katrina Romatowski (16:36):
But...
Dr. Michael H. Morris (16:37):
I'm sure you could come up with 90 or you could come up with 75, but the first part of the answer to your question is that when entrepreneurship is taught to people, whether it's in a university or in a community setting, the center learning device
business plan. You're going to learn how to run a business because I'm going to teach you the components of a business plan has a section on the numbers and a section on marketing and a section on operations.
Or there's a technique called the lean startup, which is.
approach to sort of hypothesis driven approach.
We find with the low income and disadvantaged people, because poverty is about much, the poverty experience is about much more than a lack of income. Poverty is multi-dimensional. And if you're born into that experience, the housing, the food, the chronic illness, the single parenthood, the social exclusion, the crime, all the things that make up the poverty experience, they
create unique obstacles.
One of those is they develop a very short-term orientation. Life is about getting through the week. Life is about getting through the month.
Katrina Romatowski (18:01):
keeping a roof over my kids heads this month, paying the rent, the utilities on.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (18:07):
And every decision is a trade-off. Do I pay the rent? Or do I pay the doctor's bill? I can't do both. And so they suboptimize and end up paying more for both.
That, we call it a scarcity mindset, but that short-term orientation.
Keep that in mind for a second. And then imagine walking into some community place that's there to help people start businesses. And the first question you're asked is, well, do you have a business plan? And the person goes, what's that? Well, it's like this five-year projection of a
Katrina Romatowski (18:43):
Five years, who can think about next month?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (18:47):
That's exactly it.
So we don't use the business plan. We encourage them. We help them with business plans. But that's not the centerpiece. And the lean startup just doesn't apply. They're not building scalable businesses. So what we discovered is the mountain itself is too imposing to climb. If you look at the
So the more we learned about, not just over the years about entrepreneurship, but about poverty, we found that a stepwise approach just made more sense. It makes the journey not seem as impossible. I don't need to worry about the other end of the rainbow. I just need to worry about the next five
that if we could hold their hand and take five steps with them, they'll take five steps on their own so that progress begins with progress. And it works. It fits this context. And that's probably the most important message. Entrepreneurship, as conventionally taught, that doesn't work with this audience. And so when we have mentors, when we have student consultants, when we have community people supporting what we're doing,
We first have to make sure they get, this is not your mother's entrepreneurship. This is a different kind of entrepreneurship. And so that's why the stepwise method. 80 is more when we mapped it out carefully and we revised it and revised it and revised it. It might have been 78, but we rounded it up to 80. And there were 80 legitimate steps that were really critical.
Katrina Romatowski (20:23):
So as you're telling me about this, it's noteworthy to me. I mean, it actually surprises me how much you understand the life of these young, or these entrepreneurs. And not on just a theoretical level, but you really get it. And how did you get this understanding, what it's really like to exist in the poverty experience and to
even have the ability to look up and see there's something else.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (20:52):
I don't know. mean, I think the key to our program and working is a mix of empathy and humility. I wouldn't pretend to be an actual.
It's, whether it's poverty, whether it's a veteran with a disability because of, you know, they were injured in the war.
woman who has had every door closed to her and had to deal with a lot of...
integration and discrimination but it's about disadvantage.
I don't know. I...
have tried to immerse myself in it and learn what I could. I can't walk in their shoes. I can't know what each of the folks is really experiencing and how they really are looking at
but I've been doing it long time now. think...
Probably the most significant experience for me was I...
I did a Fulbright Scholarship.
take off from teaching and you could go somewhere else and teach in a university. And I went to South Africa for six months on a Fulbright. And it was an incredible time because Nelson Mandela had been released from prison. The apartheid legislation had all been banned. And free and fair elections were scheduled and then happened. And if you ever saw that movie, Invictus,
South Africans had no chance and won the World Cup in rugby. All this was happening.
there doing this Fulbright. And I just fell in love with the country and what was happening. And so I went back and lived there for two years and taught at the University of Cape Town.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, around every big city, these shanty towns grow up where people come to the city looking for work, but they can't afford to live in the city. So they build a shack on non-arable land. then 10 years later, there's a million people living in shacks around them. And they were being ignored by and large. And so while I was in South Africa, we launched a program to go into the townships.
entrepreneurs, sort of predecessor of what we do now.
drinking from a hot fire hose in terms of the reality. And this was poverty like you can't imagine. And yet hope and promise and people that had imaginative ideas. So if you're poor and you're living in shacks, well, here comes along an entrepreneur who says, I'm going to open the first laundromat in a shantytown, in a township.
And he makes a go of it. worked with a woman whose both of her daughters had been badly sexually abused. And she, the mother and the two daughters in the middle of the township of Cuyahoga, terrible poverty, opened the first spa for women. So those kind of experiences were formative for me in terms of.
coming to understand and developing the tool kits that we use today.
process.
Katrina Romatowski (24:32):
What a gift to be able to see someone, the light bulb go on, and have them, and see them realize they have access. One, they actually have a space to articulate a dream, and then they have the access to have that dream become real.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (24:52):
Yeah, I often say this when I'm talks to certain audiences, people who get to do what we get to do. mean, what job is there where your purpose is to encourage people to have dreams and then show them how to make those dreams come true?
really doesn't get much better.
Katrina Romatowski (25:20):
Okay, so someone watching this right now, they're working two jobs, they have this business idea they think of at 2 a.m., and if they walked into your program tomorrow, what happens to them over the next six weeks?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (25:36):
Well, it's a 10-month program.
Katrina Romatowski (25:37):
what happens to them over the next 10 months?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (25:40):
They first have six weeks of training, so usually six Saturdays of training. So the folks that we serve are from 18 to 70 years old. It's pretty consistent across the cities. It's about 70 % female. It's over 90 % people of color.
but a very diverse mix of people. About one third of them are at the idea stage. About one third have a product or service that they're selling, but no registered business, no business bank account.
system. And then a third have a business but they're struggling to get traction. So they go through six weeks of training to get them all on the same page. You have to finish one part of the program to be eligible for the next. So there's a bit of tough love there trying to pose a little bit of discipline.
They then get a mentor. And so the mentor is a successful entrepreneur from the community who mentors them for about four months. They meet every other week for an hour. Some of these mentoring relationships end up going on for years, but the commitment is...
If they finish the mentoring they become eligible for student consulting so students then in small teams will help them Create a bookkeeping system or create a website or create a social media campaign or set their prices or whatever they need which Pushes those students into the sort of their discomfort zone, which is a good thing And that's how you get to roughly a little over ten months
In addition to those three components, twice a year we have what's called Community Connect. One of challenges with these entrepreneurs is they have very limited social networks. So we work to expand their social networks by having two big social networking events. We invite the business community, the university committee to these events. The fifth part is for those ready to take on debt, which is not very many of them.
We have a pathway to microcredit where we'll connect them to sources of microcredit. And then there's a database that tracks these ventures on 37 metrics for three years. If you ask the question, how many low income and disadvantaged people in Seattle started a venture last year, the city doesn't have a clue, the state doesn't have a clue. There is no data. What's their success rate? We don't know. Do they start businesses at a higher or faster or lower rate than the rest
So when you start to expand that to 60 cities in the raw collection of this data, you start to get a picture of
So those are the six components.
Katrina Romatowski (28:27):
And that'd be really fascinating. And we have a lot of data on how many businesses succeed and are around five years from the time that they start. But the information that you're, the data that you're talking about, that will be so revealing when we're able to see people who have this kind of drive and have this kind of opportunity. What do those metrics look like?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (28:50):
Yeah, and the other thing, because you mentioned it, is these entrepreneurs, if they've heard anything, they've heard all the urban legends. So I'll walk into a room full of them. And the magic of the program is the cohort. They go through as a cohort. And that is why it works. Because if you've got 50 or 70 or 35 of these entrepreneurs in one room together, there's a vibe.
Energy, but there's a spirit of celebration when one of them Just got a key account or one of them just open a facility or one of them just They all celebrate and we celebrate that through the social media we do They collaborate with each other. They one of them finds a church that has a kitchen that you can use to make stuff in They share with each other they do co-marketing together. So that that
that cohort based, imagine a woman sitting in the back who has a crappy life. But you can see a woman over there at that table who she knows her life is twice as bad as mine. If she can do it, I can do it. And there's a lot of that.
Katrina Romatowski (30:08):
I just gave me goosebumps. And also when a lot of times the thought around business and entrepreneurship, the dog-eat-dog world, the competition, right? And that's business, but that's not what you're talking about. This is something where it's collaborative, the community, they give to each other, and they see each other's success as the success for the whole. And it creates success for them.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (30:32):
Yeah, and that's true. What you just said is very true. But they're also learning discipline of running a business.
Because as you start to succeed and you come from disadvantage, people want you to share some of
gain to support this and learning to know I've got to reinvest.
want to get to.
do that if I, so it creates a lot of very hard decisions.
Katrina Romatowski (31:05):
So what? I've got two more questions. That's what I, okay, is that the, oh, I was doing nine and 10. Eight and nine, okay. So now, so, yeah, okay. Six, seven. Oh, my kids are something weird now. Okay, so now you're here in Seattle, Seattle U, and on-ramp. This is a city that has Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, Costco, some of the fastest growing income inequality in the country.
entrepreneurship for the underserved look like in a city that worships tech billionaires.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (31:42):
I think it looks the same as it does in Atlanta and in South Bend and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. mean, there are market niches that are not well-served by large incumbent firms where these businesses can make a decent income. But it could be somebody who makes candles or somebody who makes
You know, have a woman who's done super well in South Bend who sells sea moss. You know, you eat it. And I can tell you because I've heard the story.
Katrina Romatowski (32:26):
Freedom through Seamoth.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (32:28):
92 vitamins or healthy things from sea moss.
But she puts it in different kind of products and so forth. And she's made it go up. She's making money. She's doing well. So I think it looks like that in Seattle. And so as much as people say maybe we don't need another hair salon, maybe we don't need another home health care business, who's to say that? There is a.
marketplace out there, these entrepreneurs have to be smart, they have to learn to differentiate themselves, you know, and so it may be a cleaning business, but.
What our program is helping them do is see, you can do this without a lot of money. Don't worry about the fact that bank won't loan you money and no equity investor. You can do this. There's clever ways to leverage resources to. But it's also teaching them that so whatever you start out to create, if you're successful, is not what you're going to create. It's going to look very different.
So we had a woman in the program who had a cleaning business. And she started off cleaning homes, because that's what she knew how to do. But she was learning all the time. And she was not hung up on, I know this is the way to set my prices. She was open to changing, and trial and error. And she started to see, can't make money cleaning homes. Not enough. She's a single mom.
But she's studying the cleaners that are making, doing better. And they're more heavily cleaning offices. So she changes to focus on cleaning offices.
does better. And she starts to, she's still learning and studying and trying stuff. She starts to see that it's the ones cleaning medical offices that seem to be doing even better. are better customers, they pay better. So she changes again.
And she starts to these medical offices have feces and blood and urine and bio-waste that she can get certified in bio-waste cleaning and charge four times per hour.
Today, she doesn't clean at all. She certifies other people in bio-waste. And helping them understand that that's what the journey's going to look like. So maybe you start off selling eyelash extensions. But our purpose, we often say we're not in the idea-killing business. The world of entrepreneurship is
Pitch your idea to me. I'm going to rip it apart. If there's anything left, maybe you've got something. Our philosophy is that exact opposite. OK. Eyelash extension business is going to be tough. Hard to make money. You're buying them. You're getting much. You're buying them at retail prices often, not wholesale. But if you understand that the journey is going to take you and you're going to adapt and you're going to maybe add this kind of product or that kind
Look at this kind of
One step at a
Katrina Romatowski (35:35):
So what's the biggest lie the world tells people about who gets to start a business?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (35:41):
Yeah, I started to say that some of the urban legends, the two big ones are, because I'll walk into the room and I'll say, how many you have heard something like 98 % of all startups?
Katrina Romatowski (35:57):
Yep.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (35:58):
Yeah, I've heard that for sure.
Katrina Romatowski (36:00):
Don't even start.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (36:02):
If it was 98%, you're better off going to Las Vegas. The odds are better there than in
The numbers tell us in America the new business failure rate, it's usually measured in terms of the first five years. The failure rate is 45%, which is still high.
Katrina Romatowski (36:22):
That is not nearly as high as what I've always heard.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (36:25):
Well, and that rate varies by sector. Restaurants.
molding, plastic moldings is a little lower. But that's the first thing we're trying to tell them. And if you can get to two years, if you can get to four years, if you can get to two employees, if you can get to five employees, your probability, we call this thresholds. If get to these thresholds, your probability of success goes dramatically up. The other myth is
You still have people that will walk into rooms and they'll go pound their chest. I'm an entrepreneur. I was born this way.
You're not an entrepreneur. You're not an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. was born this way. For some reason, they seem to work.
Katrina Romatowski (37:12):
That's what I'm talking about.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (37:14):
But the evidence is very clear cut. Over 45 years of research on the psychology, the sociology of the entrepreneur. And not one shred of evidence to suggest that entrepreneurs are born. have to have an entrepreneur DNA in there somewhere. It doesn't mean all of us can create the next.
TikTok or whatever, but anybody can build a financially sustainable business. And that, think, is the most important thing. The message these entrepreneurs.
Katrina Romatowski (37:57):
What? One more question? All right. I think it is two. All right, so if you could fix one systemic thing about the way America thinks about entrepreneurship, one thing that would change everything for the people who've been locked out, what would it be?
Dr. Michael H. Morris (38:15):
Ugh.
I think that...
There was actually a scholar, a very respected guy, who wrote a published paper, peer-reviewed paper.
who basically said...
When we talk about entrepreneurship, if it's not a high-growth scalable venture, which usually means...
It's just, if it's not that, it's a complete waste of money. Society should not invest resources in anything.
This is a very respected guy. And we wrote a...
Rebuttal to that and it actually became a Wall Street Journal debate But the point is these ventures matter they play a critical role in society for every uber there are a whole hell of a lot of uber drivers each one of those drivers is an entrepreneur and You need This kind these kinds of entrepreneurs these kinds of businesses so
When it comes to resources, and I make a big point that it's not about money. Many of these entrepreneurs, if I gave every one of them $10,000, in six months the $10,000 would be gone. The business may or may not be better off. So they need a lot more than just, but we need to invest in these kinds of
The community, the banking community is...
one of the culprits in this story. They are set up so that they will not touch these businesses, not until they're three years or more in and have consistent profits and have other places they can get money. So we need to rethink. There's like this point where you start to become eligible for some kind of even micro
credit through these CDFIs. Most of our entrepreneurs are before that point.
So we need to create an investment scheme that includes both grants and micro loans tied to progress, tied to 80 steps, done in stages. And we don't have that system in this country. And it's not just financial investment. It's other resources. But I think that would be the
Katrina Romatowski (40:38):
And we have that now existing at 60 universities.
Dr. Michael H. Morris (40:42):
cities are not, some of the cities are run by nonprofits, most by universities.
Katrina Romatowski (40:48):
So let's grow that.