Over decades of working with students and alumni who have launched their own businesses, Wharton vice dean of entrepreneurship and Simon and Midge Palley Professor Lori Rosenkopf kept coming back to the same question: What makes an entrepreneur unstoppable? The answer, she discovered, is startling. While the Silicon Valley prodigy or venture-backed unicorn “get outsized attention from the media because of their outsized accomplishments,” Rosenkopf says, she learned that such high-profile figures actually make up a very small segment of the startup world. Successful entrepreneurs, she says, don’t represent a singular demographic.
“The most rewarding part of my 32-year career at Wharton has been meeting incredible student and alumni entrepreneurs,” she says. “They’re working in many industries doing all sorts of entrepreneurship, challenging that stereotype. They’ve given me a unique vantage point for understanding what it takes to succeed and the many paths that lead to it. It’s clear that there are countless ways to start a business, just as there as countless businesses to grow.”
This revelation led to Rosenkopf’s new book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value Through Innovation, published by Wharton School Press. As the title suggests, entrepreneurship isn’t confined to tangible inventions, such as physical products. It also means finding intangible solutions such as services or innovative processes — methods that improve on or introduce new ways of achieving outcomes. (Think groundbreaking business models, like subscription-based software such as Salesforce or digital payment platforms, namely PayPal, that demonstrate how entrepreneurs can drive massive change without inventing a material asset.) Either way, she says, to create value through innovation, you need to do two things: generate an idea, and find resources to develop it into a business.
“In the end, it’s not about having the perfect plan — it’s about having the courage to begin,” she explains. “And to begin, you have to believe in your idea and, critically, that you are the right person to bring that idea to market. Too many people never get there because they are limited by their beliefs. And particularly limiting is the belief in the ‘tech unicorn’ stereotypes, which can prevent them from even seeing themselves in the role.”
Rosenkopf knew she was onto something with her more expansive — and realistic — view of entrepreneurs through moderating panels for groups, including Wharton and Penn alumni. “The panelists I choose are always industry innovators who defy the notion of a singular demographic and share insights into their business journeys, achievements, idea generation, and fundraising strategies,” she explains. “But while audiences are always engaged, I’ve noticed they’re most captivated when panelists open up about the challenges they’ve faced — moments of self-doubt, unexpected obstacles, and even bad luck they’ve had to overcome. These candid reflections offer an unvarnished glimpse into the realities of entrepreneurship and the resilience it takes to succeed, serving as both inspiration and a reminder that most stories of entrepreneurship conceal the toughest moments along the way.”
In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, Rosenkopf features a cross-section of founders who have taken different journeys and overcome distinct challenges. Although each chapter explores a unique entrepreneurial path, along with inspiring Wharton alumni who have followed it to found successful businesses, her “Six R’s of an Entrepreneurial Mindset” provide a central theme that resonates across those chapters. “No matter their business, entrepreneurs share some specific capabilities and experiences,” says Rosenkopf. Through the lens of her own research and the studies of colleagues as well as her interactions with more than 20,000 students throughout her career, Rosenkopf developed the six R’s: reason (the “why” behind the founding of a business), relationships, resilience, resources, results, and recombination (the bringing together of different ideas and experiences to develop new products, services, and processes). Here, we explore two of those key mindsets from the book through the personal stories of alumni entrepreneurs interviewed by Rosenkopf — and explain why a seemingly obvious “R” didn’t make her list.
Relationships as a Foundation for Success
Not all relationships are created equal when it comes to entrepreneurial achievement. Rosenkopf’s research reveals that it’s not just about whom you know, but how you engage with them — and the unexpected connections that can make all the difference. Those relationships include the obvious — investors, business partners, and mentors — but also employees, family, friends, and critics. Jesse Pujji C06 W06, founder and CEO of Gateway X, a platform to help aspiring business founders, gained invaluable advice and continued guidance from an investor who backed out of a plan to buy Ampush, a digital marketing firm that Pujii co-founded before starting Gateway X. It was that potential buyer who suggested taking a fresh look at the business strategy and adopting an innovative approach to scaling. He “advised us to work with fewer clients, go deeper with them, add more value to them, and charge based on our results,” Pujji explains in Unstoppable Entrepreneurs. He says that fresh strategy allowed him to build new capabilities, develop a more results-oriented culture, and ultimately sell Ampush in an eight-figure exit.
Biotech founder and CEO Joan Lau ENG92 WG08 believes that relationships within the company — among co-founders, partners, and key hires — and outside it, with scientists from whom she licenses existing technologies, are a catalyst for opportunity, collaboration, and long-term success. Her road from drug developer at Merck to head of Philadelphia-based Spirovant Sciences included “plenty of problems and stress, and times where I did not know the answers,” she admits in the book. “Having a business partner helps, because, first, tactically, both people aren’t usually down at the same time, so someone can lift the other. And second, hard times are a little less hard when you have people to share the pain together, whether that’s in a partnership or on a team. The good times are that much richer when you have people you care about sharing them. So having business partners or co-owners helps a lot.”
But in the risky world of biotech, where developing a new drug comes with significant uncertainties including sky-high capital costs, lengthy approval processes, regulatory hurdles, and the potential for clinical trial failures, business partners are only part of the story. Lau learned through her experiences at Merck that a leaner organization with the right resources, culture, and talent could move the process forward with greater efficiency and somewhat less risk. So she joined the world of bioscience startups to hire and collaborate with the motivated, resilient people who would help her make it happen.
Even with the right talent and the right partners, though, starting from scratch to reach Lau’s goal of developing a new treatment for those living with cystic fibrosis would have been very slow and expensive. Instead, Spirovant Sciences found, licensed, and developed a number of technologies from other scientists. That move significantly reduced R&D costs and shortened the runway for development of a promising gene therapy that’s now in clinical trials.
For Katlyn Grasso W15, founder of GenHERation, a platform that connects young women with industry leaders and career opportunities, networking isn’t just a passion — it’s a strategic priority. By fostering relationships that provide both guidance and financial backing, she has made connection-building central to her work, even hiring key talent, like a data scientist, to free up more time for it. But as Grasso tells Rosenkopf, the relationships that support her success most are with her family: “Ever since I told them I wanted to be an entrepreneur when I was a teenager, they never tried to persuade me to pursue a less risky career. My dad instilled confidence into my sister and me that we could do anything we wanted to do. There are no limits. When I had an idea for a business before I could even drive, he would pick me up from school and take me to meet with potential clients. I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur if it weren’t for my family.”
Recombination — the DNA of a Winning Enterprise
One of the most surprising yet powerful elements of Rosenkopf’s entrepreneurial mindset is recombination. The idea stems from the classic “creative destruction” theory of economist Joseph Schumpeter, which posits that entrepreneurs drive economic growth by recombining various resources, ideas, and capabilities to develop new products, services, and processes that can make traditional ones obsolete. The most disruptive of these innovations create new markets, industries, or ways of doing business. Consider how streaming services like Netflix and Spotify revolutionized the way we consume media, or how ride-sharing platforms like Uber and Lyft reshaped urban transportation.
The elements of recombination aren’t limited to new technologies or business models, however; they also extend to personal experiences and knowledge. Even setbacks and challenges can be transformed into powerful differentiators, as Amy Errett WG88, CEO and founder of hair-care brand Madison Reed, discovered. She leveraged the insights and skills she gained from working as an investment banker, a venture capitalist, and a serial entrepreneur — she launched multiple businesses before Madison Reed — to shape her company’s vision and hone her intuition.
Errett tells Rosenkopf that working for others led her to entrepreneurship because the experience highlighted a key personal strength that she wasn’t able to leverage. “Entrepreneurs feel something or know something before others do, so when you work in somebody else’s environment, it can be very frustrating,” Errett notes. “You’re trying to explain that you know something’s going to be true, and they say, ‘Where’s the data?’ So entrepreneurship for me came out of two things: One is knowing that I was not in my genius zone, or zone of being happiest, in the environment of bigger companies. The second is, I’m a disruptor by nature, and I believe disruptors are always better at creating something than going into somebody else’s business and trying to disrupt it.”
Recombination — what Errett defines as putting pieces of a puzzle together from things she has seen before — is what she credits with increasing the probability that her ideas will work. “When I was looking at potential business opportunities, I saw the success of Dollar Shave [Club] and other consumer-goods companies,” she says in the book. “I wondered: If that could be done with razors, what’s the women’s analog? It’s coloring one’s hair. At the time I had that insight, I don’t think anybody else was thinking about hair color.” While Errett got pushback from potential investors, she believed so strongly in her insight that she founded Madison Reed, which is expanding its retail presence and salon offerings while capitalizing on growing consumer demand for high-quality, salon-grade DIY solutions.
Jackie Reses W92, CEO of Lead Bank, offers another powerful example of how recombining diverse experiences and perceptions can drive entrepreneurial success. With a background spanning finance, technology, and leadership at companies including Square and Yahoo, she has seamlessly blended her expertise to transform community banking. By applying fintech innovation to a traditional industry, Reses is reshaping how small businesses access capital and financial services.
At Yahoo, Reses brought her expertise in private equity together with her desire to start something new. She established the investment company Altaba Holdings, which was formed from the Yahoo assets in Alibaba — a stake that was worth almost the entire market cap of Yahoo itself. Years later, at Square, she leveraged her experience in tech to change how banking is done in the United States. “We started something from an idea: building a bank within the company that does lots of other activities,” Reses says in Unstoppable Entrepreneurs. “We turned a merchant cash-advance project into a loan product and literally built it from there. It was a pretty daunting thing to do. I remember having zero employees, so when we needed an operations function, we hired one person. We started small and made it incrementally better step by step. It’s how Square became an unbelievably successful fintech company by any metric.”
Reses attributes her success at Lead Bank to the opportunities and relationships it provided, which positioned her well for entrepreneurship and maximized her chances of success. “You don’t have to do it when you’re 20; you could do it when you’re 50 or 70. It really depends on when you think you have the right factors and the right moment in time. It all came together for me after Square: right time, right place, right team, right everything. I wouldn’t have wanted to do this without the experience we had at Square. One created the foundation for the other.”
The Risk-Taker Myth, Debunked
Interestingly, Rosenkopf’s Six R’s don’t include one word commonly associated with entrepreneurs: risk.
“This surprises people,” she says, “because of the conventional wisdom that entrepreneurs are great risk-takers. Research actually suggests that entrepreneurs avoid unreasonable risk. If you’re holding back because you’re not an impulsive thrill-seeker or a gambler, you’ll be intrigued by the people you meet in the book. Even the trailblazers who disrupt their industries, like Amy Errett, aren’t reckless. They take calculated risks that are grounded in a clear vision, experience, and confidence in their potential for success.”
This strategic approach to uncertainty is also evident in how some entrepreneurs choose to fund their ventures. Jesse Pujji, for example, discovered first-hand that investor funding isn’t always the safest route to success. While using other people’s money may seem less risky, his story highlights two key reasons why self-funding — bootstrapping — can be a safer bet. First, taking external funding often involves giving up significant control and ownership, and second, it means facing high expectations and pressure from investors to achieve rapid growth and return, often at the expense of stability.
But even with a firm belief in the benefits of bootstrapping, Pujji’s path to founding and self-funding a business wasn’t a straight line. He and his co-founders spent about four years in consulting and investment-management jobs while they explored potential startup ideas. Pujji was inspired by his father, who started his own company and showed his son the benefits of creating “a longer runway to learn and grow the business without external capital.”
Rosenkopf explains that Pujji’s desire to bootstrap his business puts him in good company: Only about one out of 100 entrepreneurs receives venture funding, and roughly two out of five secure any form of external funding. That’s in part due to the risk, and also to the venture capital industry’s well-documented bias. (In 2023, startups founded exclusively by women received approximately two percent of U.S. venture capital funding. Black founders obtained less than one percent of venture funding, with all minority founders collectively receiving less than three percent.)
Another entrepreneur featured in Rosenkopf’s book, Jarrid Tingle W13, is addressing that bias directly as managing partner of Harlem Capital, whose mission is not only to invest in 1,000 diverse founders, but also to create a new generation of venture capitalists who will change the industry. Like most of the entrepreneurs Rosenkopf highlights, Tingle started small while working a full-time job. He and his business partner, Henri Pierre-Jacques, were colleagues at private equity firm ICV Partners when they began investing in startups on the side. Their early experience led to a key insight that ultimately inspired them to launch their own fund.
“We were 25-year-olds with a $50,000 pool to invest,” Tingle recalls in the book. “We began with no experience investing in startups, but we quickly launched a website and built a brand to help us source deals.” As they started making investments, they noticed a pattern: The diverse founders they backed faced disproportionate challenges in raising capital. “It would be more challenging, take longer, and they would often receive subpar terms,” Tingle explains. Recognizing this as a major market inefficiency — one that left potentially high-growth businesses with diverse founders underfunded — Tingle, Pierre-Jacques, and their team set out to change the landscape with Harlem Capital.
Entrepreneurship isn’t just about bold ideas, though — it’s also about smart strategy that manages risk. That’s exactly what Charbel Zreik WG05 embraced when he skipped the startup phase and its sky-high failure rate in favor of scaling an established business. Zreik found untapped potential in an existing company and turned it into a thriving enterprise. His story is proof that entrepreneurship isn’t all about taking risks — it’s also for those who know how to spot opportunity and make it grow.
For Zreik, that meant finding investors to fund his search for an acquisition target — a search that led him to analyze 450 individual businesses. “I had a few favorite industries, like co-working, HR software, and IT services,” he tells Rosenkopf. “But I learned very quickly that each industry had only a few good targets, so the search needed to be broader. I ended up focusing on 50 or 60 industries, putting them through my screening criteria, and then picking the ones that rose to the top.”
He eventually landed on telecom and IT services firm DCI Design Communications, whose annual revenue was $18 million. “I ultimately chose DCI because IT services for hotels were a multibillion-dollar industry, and I valued it at the time at $24 million,” he says. Three and a half years later, with revenue doubled, he sold the company for more than three times the purchase price.
Now, Zreik has recombined his entrepreneurial and investment expertise with his spiritual vision as the founder and principal of Manifestations Capital, a firm that partners with entrepreneurs in the healing and consciousness sectors to scale mission-driven businesses. His success hasn’t been about luck or reckless risk-taking. It’s the result of strategic decision-making, leveraging industry insights, and scaling an established business in a smart, calculated way.
Stories to Inspire Your Next Big Thing
As Rosenkopf shows in Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, many of the stereotypes about entrepreneurship — like the need for big risks or a lone genius idea — don’t hold up. Instead, it’s about building the right relationships, recombining experiences in creative ways, and navigating risk strategically. Her book sets the record straight, proving that successful entrepreneurs don’t just take chances — they make smart moves that create lasting value.
“I want people who are working at any job anywhere to read about these entrepreneurs, say ‘Here’s a small problem I could solve,’ then create a side hustle and make it happen,” Rosenkopf says. “When you start doing something entrepreneurial, it becomes easier to envision yourself in one of the bigger pathways I explore in the book. I’m saying to readers, ‘You can see it, you can be it. Start small and find a way to make it happen.’”
Lauren Starkey is a business writer and author covering leadership, management, and workplace trends.
Published as “What’s the Secret to Startup Success?” in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Wharton Magazine.
