In business circles, entrepreneurship is understood as a major force that is driving globalization, ensuring the flow of goods and services across national borders, and assisting the emerging markets in reaching their potential. More significantly, Supervision (American entrepreneuriala, 1999, p. 6) reported that "the entrepreneurial spirit of U.S. companies is the envy of global business leaders, according to a stud y of 50 global companies undergoing change and transformation." In this report, interviews with two American-based entrepreneurs, both working in the fast-paced world of e-commerce, will be described and linked to the literature on successful entrepreneurship.
The first interview was conducted with a 28-year-old female named "Allison" who owns and operates an e-commerce retail site that markets arts and crafts items and kits, generating total annual sales of about $125,000. This entrepreneur remains in business after five years. The second interview was with "David," a 32 year-old partner in a dotcom enterprise that, at its peak, garnered revenues of over $6 million through brokering sales of licensed computer hardware (parts) and software products; this entrepreneur is now "retired" having sold his firm to a larger rival.
Neither Allison nor David stated that they had come from an "entrepreneurial background;" both had dual-earner family backgrounds, with professional fathers and in one case a mother who was a nurse and in the other a mother who was a part-time sales clerk in a department store. David did have close friends who also were "technocrats" and who opened entrepreneurial internet-based businesses; he claims that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were his role models and stated that he worked throughout high school and college, with college-age experience in Internet sales and marketing. Allison, on the other hand, says that she had no specific role model of an entrepreneurial orientation and that as an ar...