There&#x27;s a narrative we&#x27;re told about entrepreneurs that we&#x27;re not told about Wall St. One of the founding values of America is that anyone with innovative entrepreneurial drive can start their own business and build wealth from nothing. It&#x27;s what brought so many immigrants to this country, and is even taught to us in school as being the backbone of capitalism.<p>Most people in America have never actually met a successful entrepreneur. The shop keep down the street is usually under water with loans, and the big successes are corporations headquartered far away, the founders living in expensive seclusion. Heck, in my case it wasn&#x27;t until I arrived in the Bay Area in my early 20&#x27;s before I actually met someone who ran a successful business in person.<p>The successful entrepreneur is this key person in our social mythology, and stays very much a myth to most people. Their success gets spun into compelling stories that give a lot of hope to those who want a way out of poor circumstances. And in an effort to spin stories that sell, journalists (and PR people) often omit key facts, to match the &quot;Self-Made Man&quot; narrative that the people want to hear.<p>So, learning that yes it indeed is mostly myth and that no, not everyone can get a shot at being &quot;Self-Made&quot; - is pulling the curtains back on a long standing cultural deceit. The truth that success is mostly limited to a tiny subset of the population based on mixed factors like wealth, education, location, social values, generational cohort, parental upbringing etc, is a bitter pill to swallow.<p>Eager, but disadvantaged, entrepreneurs have been entering the tech market with this key information being withheld, aiming their sights on holding out for mega VC rounds when they should have been focused on earning a living. This leads to painful failures that could have been prevented.  Had these founders been given the right narrative to begin with, they might have been better aligned to scale of business success that&#x27;s reasonably within their grasp. That&#x27;s the issue here