What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial?
TL;DR — Nine pages introducing effectuation — the finding that expert founders reason from available means toward possible ends, not from goals backward.
Nine pages, and the foundation of the effectuation literature.
Sarasvathy gave the same venture problem to expert founders and observed how they actually reasoned. The finding: they did not start from a goal and work backwards to required resources (causal reasoning, which is what business schools teach). They started from who they were, what they knew, and whom they knew, and asked what could be made from that — then let the goal be shaped by whoever committed.
The operating principles that follow — affordable loss rather than expected return, partnerships over competitive analysis, leveraging surprise rather than avoiding it — are the most directly usable framework in Company Building, and they are all in these nine pages.
Where this came from
9 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.