Entrepreneurship Trends

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRENDS
Name
University
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Entrepreneurship Trends
Executive Summary
Entrepreneurship is a discipline that is evaluated in this paper, using the angle of Woodman’s
GoPro Company. This paper undertakes the examination by first looking into the dark side that is
associated with entrepreneurship. Woodman was apprehensive in running with the idea of GoPro
kind of an idea because three things stood on his way; despair, resource and financial constraint
and uncertainty. Given the dynamic business and economic environment, GoPro, like any other
company faces a lot of threats in its undertaking as has been deliberated in this paper. Looking
into the competitive advantage that GoPro has had in its marketing processes, this paper sheds
light on some of its strengths. Some of the competitive advantages leveraged by GoPro include;
strong distribution networks, bearing of a strong brand name and its ability to venture into new
markets. On the other hand, the paper identifies the threats facing GoPro and the ways of
tackling them.
Introduction
In basic terms, entrepreneurship refers to the ability, willingness and the capacity to work on a
new venture despite the risks associated with it, for purposes of generating a profit.
Entrepreneurship entails a lot of things in the process of shaping a baby idea into a fully blown
business. The case of GoPro’s Woodman provides a deeper and closer perspective into the issues
associated with entrepreneurship. This field has its dark side as is well demonstrated by
Woodman’s allusion that if he failed in GoPro business, he would opt for the workforce. For one,
he was very uncertain of whether he would succeed. Other issues like business threats hamper
the success of entrepreneurship businesses. As put forward in this paper below, businesses need
to be proactive enough to lay out feasible strategies for countering the threats.

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Part A
Question 1
Despair
Giving up is a common trait that is associated with the dark side of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is a hard venture and requires more than normal patience. Ideally, it requires
that a person creates an idea from scratch and develop it to the point of realizing success. Unlike
employment, an entrepreneur needs to be a jack of all trades, right from the beginning. Nick
Woodman had tried on online gaming before and had failed terribly registering a loss of $3.9
million of investors’ money. He thus opted that if the GoPro project failed, he will give up on
and joins the workforce (Kuratko 2016). Entrepreneurship can take a person a very long time to
break through and succeed. The tricky part of it is that the entrepreneur will not know if he/she
will succeed or not. That is, with entrepreneurship, there is no soft landing and if a person fails,
he/she would have wasted a long time in life, that cannot be redeemed (Zahra and George 2017).
In that case, entrepreneurship needs a very high amount of tolerance and perseverance to realize
success. Many people start start-ups but a majority of them fail to make it succeed because they
give up on the way. Despair is thus a trait that serves best the characterization of the dark side of
entrepreneurship.
Uncertainty
Another trait that characterizes the dark side of entrepreneurship is uncertainty. With
entrepreneurship, there is no point to bank on its success. The future is not based on tangible
proof of success but trial and error. It all relies on the faith of an entrepreneur that everything is
going to work out to the full realization of success. What led or inspired Woodman to think about
the workforce as an alternative to his work on GoPro was the fact that he was certainly unsure of

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the fate of his entrepreneurial work. He had failed before and therefore his chances of failure
were possible (Bhachu 2017). In that case, Nick Woodman was trying to find solace with the
workforce as an alternative solution. For the case of employment, the chances of earning salary
or commission are high because of the certainty that has been built by employers through strong
and reliable organizational structures. An entrepreneur, on the other hand, has to create
everything from scratch and in many cases; he/she will be working on his/her own ideas solely.
In that case, the uncertainty level of the entrepreneurship is high.
Financial and Resource constraints
The process of developing a start-up company requires a high amount of resource
investment. Since everything needs to be created from scratch, it can take a high amount of
resources to achieve a reasonable outcome. Woodman was worried about the fact that he might
fail to bear the financial needs of the entire project. For one, as a person works on an idea, it
takes all the time and energy of that entrepreneur to the extent that he/she has no time for other
activities that might inject money. For another, the process of developing the idea requires
constant use of money. Therefore financial and resource constraints are one of the traits that
characterize the dark side of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship can be learned like any other discipline. Most of the successful
businesses today are products of entrepreneurship trained people. For instance, Joshua Revees is
the founder of Gusto, a startup for payroll and benefits. He attests to the fact that his ideas were
born when he attended the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar at the University of
Stanford. The founders of Instagram are also the products of learning and training on
entrepreneurship (Eckhardt, Ciuchta and Carpenter 2018). They are Kevin Systrom and Mike
Krieger who met each other as students. It was an entrepreneurship study/work program