In today's world, everyone needs to become an entrepreneur

In 1975, at 39 years old, Amancio Ortega and his wife opened a clothing store in a remote region of Spain. He had been working in the textile industry since dropping out of school at fourteen and had taken his first stab at entrepreneurship twelve years earlier. Recognizing that the biggest expense in fashion is end-of-season markdowns, Amancio focused on making limited runs of each design, seeing which his customers liked most and iterating on those designs to capture emerging trends and limit his markdowns. Even in the backwater of A Coruña, Spain, this innovative approach to fashion proved successful, enabling Amancio to expand and scale his business profitably. 50 years later as I write, the Inditex Fashion Group has grown from that first Zara to 7,200 stores in 93 countries, and Amancio is the second wealthiest man in Europe.

When I visited the Inditex headquarters in A Coruña, I was taken to a gargantuan building the size of an airplane hangar. A long row of tables and desks ran down the center of the space offering easy access to the reams of fabric, boxes of buttons and racks upon racks of finished products hanging in the periphery. The energy was equal to the Goldman Sachs trading floor where I'd interned in business school: there were hundreds of employees talking on phones, walking back and forth, yelling urgent commands to be heard above the din. And yet through the cacophony emerged patterns of logic, like a hive.

At the far right of the table everyone was on the phone. They were talking with store managers from around the world — both inbound and outbound — to understand how customers were engaging with the current line that was in store. The store managers had been trained to track which clothes were catching people's attention on the racks. Were they just looking at them or did they bring them to the dressing room? Of those brought to the dressing room, which were left and which were brought to checkout? Every step of the customers' journey from consideration to purchase was captured by the store staff and relayed back to the people on phones in this massive room. It was analog, but it was data.

As soon as they hung up, the phone data collectors would turn to the merchants grouped around the table in the next section to their left. They shared which colors were working, which design patterns, which buttons, zippers, fringe elements, lengths. And equally importantly, they shared what was left in the dressing room or not even taken off the racks to begin with. This information was collated and passed to the designers in the next section, who would promptly start pulling fabric and materials to develop iterations on successful designs. These drawings and materials were passed along to a group of seamstresses waiting for direction, and at the end of the long line of tables stood models waiting to demonstrate how the newer versions compared to those selling out in the stores.

This human algorithm changed the world of fashion.

I haven't been back to visit Inditex in over 10 years and the humanist romantic luddite in me hopes that room remains basically unchanged. Most likely, however, the human algorithm was replaced by a digital algorithm, which, if it hasn't happened already, will imminently be replaced by AI and a handful of robots. Human ingenuity synthesized to its essence, digitized and automated. No need for a big room, let alone the hive of people.

This is the first in a how-to series (warning: I will bounce around a bit). It doesn't attempt to analyze history or forecast the future. It simply looks at the world we live in today — a world in the throes of tectonic shifts that create seismic instability — and maps out a path forward for us, the normal people. While our genius trillionaires are trying to save humanity by AI'ing everything and figuring out how to colonize Mars, we still need to pursue Maslow's hierarchy and maybe raise a family. In many ways this has become more challenging but, for those willing to change the way they think about what it means to have a career, there is tremendous opportunity to live a meaningful life in this post-corporate world: become an entrepreneur.

Post-corporate world?

Yes — traditional corporations are decreasing in relevance as the convergence of globalization, automation and remote working have changed the definition of work. The traditional bonds between employee and employer have been severed as workflows are streamlined and most stages of the value creation chain are commoditized. Work is now (almost) entirely transactional as companies change people and people change jobs with fluidity. The quaint idea that someone would join a company out of school and stay there for life is gone, even in Japan. In the modern corporation, people are only as valuable as their next contribution and employers are equally fungible.

This is particularly true for larger corporations. Employee turnover rates at Fortune 500 companies have roughly doubled in the past ten years, while data for the broader US private sector shows average tenure has declined by only 14% in the same period. Smaller, more nimble, more entrepreneurial businesses are taking share from big corporations as capitalism's creative destruction cycle accelerates, and talent is migrating to these smaller businesses that are also better at creating and sustaining culture.

So the same trends that generate instability also create opportunity. That's the exciting twist. The innovations that enable corporations to slash their workforce make it easier for smaller businesses to compete, leveling the playing field and accelerating the cycle of entrepreneurial value creation through a powerful feedback loop. Here's a simple illustration from my own experience:

When I ran Bumble and bumble in the early 2000s, we employed about 100 people in the corporate offices, excluding our salons. In 2015 my partners and I launched and built Hairstory to profitability with just 15 employees — and ten years in, the business is on the same trajectory as Bumble with one third as many people. Recently in 2024 my wife and I launched and now run Sans Savon alone, relying on a small handful of contractors for the functions we can't manage well ourselves.

There has never been an easier or better time to be an entrepreneur and as the AI revolution accelerates — enabling more corporate layoffs and giving entrepreneurs even more tools to create value — more and more jobs will shift from corporations to small entrepreneurial ventures.

Ultimately, the rise of entrepreneurialism is good for the world. While many businesses make money by extracting value (mining, oil & gas) or by arbitraging value (finance, trade and distribution), entrepreneurial businesses actually create value out of thin air. Creating value is fundamental to the human experience — generating ideas and bringing them to life — and it fulfills our most basic desire for meaning. The fact that entrepreneurial ventures are so tenuous, that they require constant attention, innovation and ongoing investment to survive and thrive — these are the elements of creating value for an entrepreneur that are comparable to building deep relationships, establishing a family or making works of art. Creating value feels good.

We don't have to be Amancio Ortega to have a fulfilling career as an entrepreneur, but there is much to learn from his example. Everything about the Zara product development process is analogous to building a business. You need to start with a good idea, measure your progress by religiously mining and evaluating data, and set up processes whereby you are constantly learning and iterating and evolving based on feedback from the marketplace. As the Zara example demonstrates, this is both radically simplistic and incredibly challenging to execute — if it were easy then every apparel brand in the world would have copied Zara by now and whittled away their competitive edge. But building a meaningful life as an entrepreneur is possible, and while entrepreneurship has a host of challenges — it's a lot of work, it's lonely, it's stressful — it feels like the best way to navigate an unstable world where the fabric of society is fraying from so much change. Even for people who wouldn't normally think of themselves as entrepreneurial.

Take control of your work life.

Create value for your customers, your team, your family, yourself.

Become an entrepreneur.

Next up: the specific do's and don'ts — starting with a story from a dinner table in Minneapolis that changed everything about how I thought a career could go.