“The entrepreneurship that matters,” Scott Shane, a professor at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, stated in “Is Entrepreneurship Dead?,” “is not the broad swath of employer or non-employer businesses but the high-potential start-ups that are backed by sophisticated investors.” Creating more venture capital and angel-backed companies, and fewer mom-and-pop retail shops, is ultimately positive, as “a few extra Facebooks and Googles are probably worth a lot of clothing shops on Main Street because they produce a lot more jobs and economic output.”
The thing that we tend to forget when we study entrepreneurs only as engines of job creation, profits or other quantifiable markers of economic growth is that every entrepreneur is a person, with hopes, dreams and feelings. Their businesses are intricately tied into the fabric of their communities in a way that numbers simply can’t capture.
In New Orleans, women in the Gentilly neighborhood now face losing a place like Friends, a hair salon that cuts and styles the hair of middle-age, professional African-American women, including the city’s mayor, LaToya Cantrell. Its owner, a soft-spoken woman named Tanya Blunt-Haynes, described Friends not as an investment or a source of income, but as a community center. Her customers will linger for hours, long past when their treatments are finished, catching up on neighborhood news with the staff or other customers, ordering in crawfish platters, or just sitting in a chair, quietly reading a book. Ms. Haynes plays soft jazz, gospel and R&B to create a relaxing mood. If someone doesn’t have the money to pay her that day, or a relative needs help with makeup for a wedding or funeral, Ms. Haynes will do the work for free, no questions asked.
Several years back, when her son Jared was murdered, Ms. Haynes returned to Friends, and was held by every single person who walked in the doors as she cried in their arms. “That’s an amazing thing: the love of women,” she told me two years ago, tearing up at the memory. “It’s not your grandmother, but it feels like Grandma. It’s not your aunt, but it feels like your aunt. It’s not your sister, but it feels like your sister.”
You see this same sense of community emerging in the entrepreneurs’ response to the pandemic. Fashion designers are sewing desperately needed face masks, craft distilleries are churning out hand sanitizer, restaurants are now donating meals to the homeless and isolated senior citizens. Entrepreneurs see where they can help their communities, and they step up.
Take my friend Andrew Badali, who usually teaches preschoolers music and is now offering his singalong classes on Instagram every weekday morning, for free, so that kids can get a dose of joy, and their parents can gain a precious hour of freedom. My friends Mike and Jaime, who own a bike shop in Toronto, are giving free tuneups to doctors, nurses and emergency medical workers so they can safely get to work. In Los Angeles, my friend Alex Grossman is directing, filming and editing commercials in his house (starring his family) for any small business that needs a boost.
In some cases, the most heroic thing an entrepreneur can do is to carry on. At New York’s Rockaway Beach Bakery, owner Tracy Obolsky still shows up each morning, mixing and stretching dough, baking her famous ham, cheese and everything bagel spice croissants (now takeout only), because her people need something to eat and, more important, someone to talk with from a safe distance. “I feel like people’s therapist,” she told me recently. “We are one of the only normal moments left in people’s lives. Even if it is just an egg sandwich.”
