Page 10 - Business Plans that Work A Guide for Small Business
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1 ENTREPRENEURS
CREATE THE
FUTURE
The weight of this crisis will not determine
the destiny of this nation. The answers to
our problems don’t lie beyond our reach.
They exist in our laboratories and universi-
ties; in our fields and our factories; in the
imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the
pride of the hardest-working people on
Earth.
-President Barack Obama
Address to Joint Session of Congress,
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
ntrepreneurship runs deep in the American psyche. Many of today’s
heroes are celebrated for their entrepreneurial achievements. Sergey
EBrin and Larry Page, Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates,
Steven Jobs, Sam Walton, and Arthur Blank among others have created
businesses that are household names (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft,
Apple, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot). Moreover, many of today’s leading
companies were founded at the depths of recession, such as IBM, Micro-
soft, GE, FedEx, Hewlett-Packard, Revlon Cosmetics among many others.
In fact, a study out of the Kauffman Foundation finds that more than half
of the 2009 Fortune 500 companies and nearly half of the 2008 Inc. 500
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