Entrepreneurship is taught too late

I spend time with students who are preparing for entrepreneurship, and with founders who wish they had prepared differently.

The contrast is instructive.

Most students expect entrepreneurship to become clearer with study. They look for frameworks, playbooks, and examples that reduce uncertainty. This makes sense. Formal education is designed to reward clarity and penalise ambiguity.

Entrepreneurship works in the opposite direction.

The hardest problems in entrepreneurship are not complex. They are ambiguous. Information is incomplete. Feedback is delayed. Consequences are uneven. Two people can make the same decision with equal care and arrive at very different outcomes.

This is what makes entrepreneurship difficult to teach.

What students often learn first are the visible parts. Pitch decks. Metrics. Market sizing. These are useful, but they sit downstream of the real work. They assume the problem has already been framed correctly.

The framing is the hard part.

Early decisions in a venture often feel small. Pricing, scope, timing, positioning. Each can be defended rationally in isolation. The difficulty lies in understanding how these choices interact, and which ones quietly constrain future options.

This is rarely obvious in the moment.

It is usually only after a venture stalls, or succeeds narrowly, that founders recognise which decisions mattered most. By then the learning feels obvious, but it was not accessible when it was needed.

This is why entrepreneurship is often taught too late.

Students encounter it after they have already been trained to optimise answers rather than question premises. When they finally meet genuine ambiguity, they experience it as personal failure rather than structural reality.

Good teaching cannot remove ambiguity. It can only prepare people to recognise it.

The goal is not confidence. It is orientation.

Knowing when a problem is analytical and when it is not. Knowing when speed helps and when it hides uncertainty. Knowing which decisions deserve patience rather than cleverness.

If entrepreneurship is to be taught seriously, it must be taught at the level of judgement, not just technique.