The Birth of Entrepreneurship out of the Spirit of Prometheus: Part 1 - Prometheus, the Original Entrepreneur

What do Zen, Taoism, and Nietzschean Existentialism have in common? Belief in the primordial oneness of existence, in the affirmation of life, that not all experiences and pleasures can be rationally explained, and that the map is not the territory. Entrepreneurship is the journey of the classic tragic hero to live life in a meaningful way. Stories of entrepreneurship fit the archetypal Hero’s Journey as describe by Joseph Campbell, and inspire us to venture into the primordial chaos and bring value back from it.

Prometheus was the original archetype of the serial entrepreneur. Partnered with Demeter, he created man out of clay. His other significant venture was stealing fire from the gods and giving it to mankind, for which he was sentenced to eternal punishment. Peter Thiel, the greatest entrepreneurial thinker of our time, recognized the dark truth of the startup founder being both a victim and a god. According to Thiel, “Many traits are normally distributed throughout the population. Suppose that all traits are aggregated on a normal distribution chart. On the left tail you’d have a list of negatively perceived traits, such as weakness, disagreeability, and poverty. On the right tail, you’d have traditionally positive traits such as strength, charisma, and wealth.” Prometheus was both an extreme insider and outsider. He was intelligent, kind, and brave, but he was a Titan. The Titans lost a cosmic battle with the Olympian gods and most were banished to Tartarus. Prometheus avoided banishment, but he was still excluded from the Olympian in-group and was in frequent conflict with Zeus. Startup founders have traits at both extremes. People start out different; most try to play down their uniqueness to fit in, but founders exaggerate their unique traits to their own advantage. Their mimetic models are archetypal heroes rather than their own peers. They choose to be idols -- embodiments of ideas -- rather than mere mortals. Gods and idols are anthropomorphic projections of archetypal ideas. They aren’t individuals to empathize with, but ideas that inspire.

The founder has to be both an extreme outsider and an extreme insider -- because as Nietzsche reveals, he needs to transcend the current value system in order to bring about innovation from chaos. The extreme outsider traits shouldn’t be viewed as negative. In fact, they are crucial, because the innovator must go beyond good and evil to reach the primordial oneness of the Tao, in order to bring forth pleasures and experiences that have yet to be mapped. “The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.” The entrepreneur who works strictly in current rational knowledge systems cannot give birth to the Zero to One startup out of the essence of the Tao.

Fire was the original innovation that separated humanity from the animals. Fire is the symbolic epitome of all innovations and technology, showing the interplay of danger and utility, chaos and mastery, and the natural and the artificial. The essence of innovation is the boldness to take risks in the face of uncertainty in hopes to bring back exponential value that permanently change the world. The hero takes one small step into the unknown chaos as an individual to take one big leap for mankind. Up until this point, we have assumed the nature of the startup founder as glamorous, but there is a huge cost: it is the voluntary sacrifice of the individual for the good of the collective. Prometheus sacrificed himself for the good of mankind. He paid a permanent cost for daring to venture into the unknown. René Girard, Peter Thiel’s literature professor, revealed the origin of mythology and religion in his mimetic theory -- sacrifice of the scapegoat for the greater good of the society.

Nassim Taleb and Warren Buffett would say that Prometheus had “skin in the game.” He took a personal risk to bring forth the potential value to the public. His actions directly affected his personal well being. This is what entrepreneurs have to do, unlike the employees of large corporations or governments. The higher the risks, the higher the rewards and the costs. The actions of Prometheus led to all following human innovations and costed him eternal torture. Taleb defines antifragility as “a convex response to a stressor or source of harm (for some range of variation), leading to a positive sensitivity to increase in volatility (or variability, stress, dispersion of outcomes, or uncertainty, what is grouped under the designation ‘disorder cluster’).” To put it simply, a system is antifragile if it benefits from errors over time. For a system to be antifragile, it must contain fragile subcomponents that are allowed to fail. The ecosystem of innovation is antifragile, and the collective gains are built upon the individual sacrifices of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs most boldly face potential personal ruin while learning from the mistakes of others. Innovation as a whole would come to a halt if no individual innovators are fragile. The individual entrepreneur must practice amor fati, the unconditional love of one’s fate, to remain emotionally antifragile regardless of the fragility of each startup project, in order to experience satisfaction in the face of existential fears of failure.

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This is a draft of the first part of a longer essay on the philosophy of entrepreneurship. The full essay will eventually appear at https://medium.com/@mimeticarbitrage