At several events over the past few weeks, I’ve heard a familiar complaint: the media does not represent entrepreneurs well. There is clearly a perception problem. Our Out of Focus briefing paper found that for every founder who thinks coverage is good, five think the opposite. By more than seven to one, respondents said the issues that matter to them are not given sufficient attention in the media. As a former journalist, I am well aware of the constraints and want to be constructive. It is still a bit half-baked, but here’s my pitch.
It begins with a 2018 post by Robin Hanson. Firm productivity depends heavily on management quality; yet even after controlling for intelligence and conscientiousness, substantial variation remains. Hanson thinks most MBA programmes do little to close this gap. Their primary function is selection and network formation. The missing ingredient, he suggests, is direct exposure — having lived through the realities of management or observed them closely.
Empirical evidence supports this. In Norway, economists Hans Hvide and Paul Oyer found that a majority of male entrepreneurs start firms in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers. Those who do tend to outperform peers whose fathers did not work in the same industry. They term this “dinner table human capital”. The effect persists even for founders whose fathers died before they entered the workforce. This is not about introductions. It is about sustained exposure.
Hanson proposes extending this logic to management education:
“If one can learn much from just watching the inside story of real firms over several years, that suggests a big win: record the full lives of many rising managers over several years, and show a mildly compressed and annotated selection of such recordings to aspiring managers. Such recordings could be compressed by deleting sleep and non-social periods. They could be annotated to identify key decisions and ask viewers to make their own choices, before they see actual choices. Recordings might be selected two-thirds from the most successful, and one-third from a sampling of others.”
A lighter version of this idea could plausibly reach a wider audience. Imagine a documentary series that follows a handful of founders over a year or two — cameras in the room for the co-founder disagreements, the hiring calls, the moments a deal nearly falls apart. The good, the bad, and the genuinely difficult. The format exists — Boiling Point, Inside the Factory, Twenty-Four Hours in A&E — just pointed at the people building Britain’s next generation of companies.
The alternative is two more decades of The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den, which have shaped the public perception of entrepreneurship. Matt Clifford’s argument from 2019 still stands:
“Perhaps the cardinal sin is [The Apprentice’s] perpetuation of the crude stereotype of the ruthless, selfish entrepreneur who sees money as the only marker of success. The reality is very different. Teams, not solo heroic figures, are responsible for the biggest entrepreneurial success — there’s huge value in having a co-founder. Also, the desire to create new companies is more often tied to wanting to maximise impact in the world, not just trying to increase their bank balance.”
Dinner table human capital is real, and the country’s media is one of the few mechanisms we have for setting more places at the table. I can’t help thinking that we might be surprised by the public’s appetite if we were a bit more ambitious about what’s being served.
Frank King
Alex Chalmers is consistently worth reading. In his latest Chalmermagne Substack article, he argues that British technology policy has cycled through a series of half-theories without settling on a coherent account of how technology drives growth.
His opening example is instructive. Barnsley was recently designated Britain’s first ‘Tech Town’, receiving £500,000 over eighteen months to support AI skills and adoption — roughly £2 per resident. The accompanying announcement claimed the status would “position Barnsley as the UK’s trailblazer.”
Even if you disagree with parts, the central point should be taken seriously: the binding constraints on growth — energy, planning, employment law, and the broader regulatory environment — largely sit outside technology policy itself.
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