The New Builders. Seth Levine

The New Builders - Seth Levine


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that our systems have become skewed too much in favor of large businesses. And in the places we've tended to support smaller enterprises, we've been overly focused on that tiny portion of new companies that have both the goal and the potential to become large businesses. In doing so, we've destroyed the level playing field that fits the entrepreneurial mythology of the American Dream and created one that stacks the odds against grassroots entrepreneurs.

      There is another cost to our love affair with big. Over the past decades, we've narrowed our focus as to where innovation happens, and in doing so, we miss seeing where creativity occurs. Especially if it's on a smaller scale.

      Fred Sachs is an inveterate entrepreneur. He bought his first company, a Main Street enterprise in Alexandria, Virginia, called Smoot Lumber, in his late thirties, and started a second one, a commercial door and hardware company, in time to ride Washington, DC's building boom in the 1980s. He sold them both, the first in 1996 and the second in 2008. He then started his third and invested in his fourth venture. In the first, a farm he owns in rural Virginia, he's experimenting with new strains of organic wheat. The second is a Canadian‐based startup that is working on developing medical diagnostic devices.

      He learns something every time around, he told us. At 76, he's every bit a New Builder – and one of his key qualities, which perhaps surprisingly seems to sharpen with age, is the ability to innovate. When Fred interviewed with the consulting firm McKinsey back in 1972, they asked whether he was more innovative or creative. Over the years, he's learned that being an entrepreneur requires both. “Sometimes you have to create a solution to a particular problem; and in other situations you have to innovate in order to get around a particular hurdle. And if you're not going to deal with the problem, you're going to be left behind. You have to continue to change.”

      Interestingly, the time we spent with New Builders suggests that entrepreneurs might actually get more innovative as they get older. Early successes free older entrepreneurs to play with ideas, and they often have extensive networks built up over time that they can leverage in new ventures. Innovation and entrepreneurship for many older entrepreneurs seem to become something of a habit.

      While it's easy to pick through history for stories of the genesis of inventions and innovations that we often take for granted in everyday life, it's much harder to imagine innovations that didn't happen. We described a version of this phenomenon in Chapter 1 when we talked about ghost companies – those businesses that never got off the ground and whose impact on our society will never be known. That these companies are invisible (they quite literally don't exist) is one of


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