Entrepreneurship

My students often use me as a sounding board for their new ventures. A sign that the modern University could pass for a hedge fund with classrooms. The request brings a chuckle as it always reminds me of my first exposure to entrepreneurial activity.

It happened in the most unlikeliest of places as well as times. A public (i.e. private) school in pre-Thatcherite England.  England was then the sick man of Europe and its decline was blamed upon the public schools.  Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, for example, argued that the schools had turned a nation of shopkeepers into one of lotus eaters.

Among the boys was a fellow, I’ll call Hodge. He was a well established source of contraband like cigarettes and pornographic magazines. He operated out of a warren of toilets in the middle of the school grounds called the White City. Why the school needed a small building devoted entirely to toilets was a product of the English distrust of indoor plumbing and central heating.

One lesson I learnt from Hodge was never buy a pornographic magazine sight unseen. The Romans call it caveat emptor, but, I think this, more vivid.

Hodge was always on the look out for new goods and services that he could offer for a profit to the other boys. One day, he hit upon the idea of buying a rubber woman (it was plastic and inflatable) and renting it out.  The customer base consisted of 400 teenage boys confined to a penal colony upon a wind blasted heath.

Consider the challenges. How was he to procure one (no internet)? Where would he hide the plastic inamorata to prevent theft or confiscation by the authorities? How would he find customers (no smart phones)? What should he charge? What was to prevent competition? And, of course, what happened? All, I think, best left to the imagination.