The Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth

An award-winning business writer delivers a new view of entrepreneurship, shifting the focus from the glitzy world of venture capital to the everyday self-starters

“A necessary corrective to Silicon Valley’s stranglehold on the meaning of entrepreneurship.” —Cal Newport, New York Times bestselling author of Deep Work

Small businesses anchor our communities and are the fabric of our economy. Yet we are often too distracted by the idea of the Silicon Valley startup, funded by vast cash resources and backed by a board of directors, to worry about what it’s like to build a business ourselves.

In this earnest and searching account, David Sax reports on the deeply personal questions of entrepreneurship: why an immigrant family risks everything to build a bakery; how a small farmer fights to manage his debt; and what it feels like to rise and fall with a business you built for yourself.

Abandoning the narrow definition of the entrepreneur as a wunderkind college dropout, The Soul of an Entrepreneur is a tribute to the everyday people who take on risk and sacrifice in the name of entrepreneurship.