The first time entrepreneurship was considered to be important enough to be taught was in 1985 when there was only 250 courses in entrepreneurship world wide, it was not until 2000 that they first started offering it as a major because of the growing number of students who wanted to own their own business.  In 2003, $300 million was invested into entrepreneurship education in U.S. colleges and universities, and in 2008 there were 5,000 entrepreneurship courses being offered worldwide with 400,000 students a year taking them and around 9,000 faculty members teaching it.  In 2012 about 33% of business incubators are based at or through universities and in 2013 a lot of colleges required their students to take a freshman level entrepreneurship course.  These statistics show that our younger generation understands that there is so much out there that can be fixed or created, and I expect these numbers to keep growing in the future to come.

The PayPal Mafia was a group of people who influenced and created what PayPal is today. The first two members were Peter Thiel and Max Levchin who created the earliest version which was called Confinity, the next notable member was Elon Musk who bought Confinity and changed the name to X.com and a long list of other, less notable people who went off and worked for and created many other companies.  The name came to be when a picture of them all in Mafia attire was on Fortune Magazine, minus Elon Musk, who later took a self portrait in Mafia attire.

I believe that most people who have not studied social enterprises believe that they have to be a by the book non-profit organization that cannot make a profit without donating it all to the cause that they are supporting, and I want to show in this post that you can create a for-profit organization that still does as much as a non-profit would do for a cause.  I took a class with Professor Sweet and Mr. Professor English that opened my eyes, because before I thought that social enterprise was just about starting a non-profit, and I was wrong, after doing many projects where it was suggested that we create a business that was for profit that would still benefit a cause, I learned that there is really no line between for profits and non profits in this space, you can have the same impact either way.  For example, my group wanted to create a coffee shop that helped animals get adopted, so we would be working with the APL which is a non-profit organization to get them the everyday that they lack for for these animals by creating a pet cafe, and allowing them to bring these animals in for people to interact with while they go through their normal day and schedule, I will be forever grateful for this class that I took and use a lot of the valuable lessons I have learned in my future endeavors.

Steve Cohen is an American billionaire that not many people talk about, he is a very successful hedge fund manager, that has one of the largest, most valuable art collections in the world, valued at $1 billion. He started out with his own hedge fund, SAC Capital, that saw 70% returns for 2 years before the SEC busted him for inside trading and suspended him from trading for 2 years, and he did not give up after this, he decided to create Point 72 Asset Management and runs it legitimately.  He has a great story and needs to be shared more.

The Ponzi scheme, Created by Charles Ponzi in 1869ish is a form of fraud that entails luring investors and paying profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.  This scheme may have been created over 150 years ago, but has been recently brought back in heavier numbers to the younger generations.  With the creation of the internet and social media it has made it very easy to start and benefit off of a scheme like this, there are a lot of young people on the internet that are always trying to find ways to make money without doing their research and it only takes one young person to pass this on like a wildfire to their peers and get them into financial trouble.  With the promise of above average returns on a low investment it is easy to fall into a trap and lose your return and never see any of it again. Be careful friends.

The industrial revolution shaped the way entrepreneurs think today, before this there was really no innovation and there was not a race to see who could innovate the most or bring out the best product.  In America the industrial revolution created today’s large cities by turning agricultural areas into large industrial areas that began thriving because of the innovation that all of these new entrepreneurs were bringing into these areas.  It was the small technological advances like the cotton gin, the spinning jenny and the power loom that really showed how much room the world had for improvement and people began to see that this type of innovation could be applied to all markets and that set the race that we call the industrial revolution.  Most of what came out of the industrial revolution was positive, like the increase of wealth everywhere, the creation of jobs and the improvement in the standard of living, but it also brought negatives like monopolization, and social classes that people are categorized in even today by the money they make, which has turned a lot of people against eachother.