Startups in distress — we’ve seen this movie before

Wired magazine offered an article on the state of things in startup-land and discovered, astonishingly, that “The Bad times are Coming for Startups.” But not every startup, of course, mainly the ones that blithely ignore entrepreneurship 101, go for growth above all else, treat profitability as a quaint artifact from another era and haven’t figured out a sustainable business model.

In the 70’s and 80’s, mainstream business types didn’t think the idea of being an ‘entrepreneur’ was particularly sexy. Indeed, saying that you were ‘self employed’ was sometimes read as an indication that you weren’t good enough to find a “real” job, wearing a grey flannel suit in an equally grey company somewhere.

Entrepreneurs go from crazy to ….cool?

That really began to change as the first wave of Silicon Valley spawned companies started to enjoy remarkable success. Microsoft (founded 1975) and Apple (founded 1976) taught the world that computers could be useful for ordinary people, while other entrepreneurial types were amassing fortunes. A later documentary about all this was literally called, “Triumph of the Nerds.”

My colleague and co-author Ian MacMillan (Mac) started the first “real” research journal in management to focus on entrepreneurship, the Journal of Business…