Are Entrepreneurs Born or Made? Why the Question Misses the Point

The long-standing debate over whether entrepreneurs are born or made often assumes a binary answer. Reza Satchu’s teaching at Harvard Business School reframes the issue by shifting attention away from innate traits and towards judgment, commitment, and the ability to operate under imperfect information. His curriculum is built on the premise that entrepreneurship is less about personality type and more about developing decision-making capacity in environments defined by uncertainty and consequence. This position is grounded in practice rather than theory, reflecting decades of founder experience alongside structured classroom experimentation.

From a Papi & Laado perspective, this framing aligns closely with National Sense of Responsibility (NSR). Ventures do not emerge in isolation; they are products of environments, incentives, and expectations. While individuals enter the ecosystem with different personalities, public data and academic commentary consistently distinguish between personality and character. Personality may shape starting conditions, but character is formed through discipline, accountability, and repeated exposure to responsibility. Satchu’s emphasis on judgment as a teachable skill reinforces this distinction, suggesting that what matters most is not who someone is at the start, but how they are shaped by the systems around them.

The interview also challenges a common misconception within venture ecosystems: that entrepreneurship rewards reckless risk-taking. Instead, Satchu describes entrepreneurship as calculated decisiveness, where founders act without full information but refuse paralysis. This has structural implications. Ecosystems that overprotect participants, preserve optionality, or remove consequence may inadvertently weaken the very judgment they seek to encourage. Conversely, environments that allow controlled exposure to risk, failure, and recovery tend to produce more resilient operators.

At Papi & Laado, experience across venture, advisory, and institutional settings suggests that outcomes improve when ecosystems are designed to build character deliberately. Some individuals may possess personality advantages that accelerate early progress, while others may progress more slowly yet surpass expectations through sustained character development. The decisive factor is not origin, but whether the environment rewards responsibility, learning from failure, and commitment over comfort. In this sense, the question of whether entrepreneurs are born or made gives way to a more practical concern: whether the ecosystem itself is fit for purpose.

From an NSR standpoint, this places responsibility not only on founders, but on institutions, educators, investors, and programme designers. If entrepreneurship is to serve national value rather than individual ambition alone, systems must be accountable for the type of character they cultivate and the behaviours they normalise.