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Originally shared in our September 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Amar Bhidé taught entrepreneurship for 35 years at Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and Tufts, and his 2000 study The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses remains one of the closest looks at how real companies get started. In this 40-minute talk at the Kansas City Public Library, he asks how anyone decides to act when the future can’t be calculated. His answer is imagination grounded in…

Originally shared in our September 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Owen Zidar (Princeton) and Eric Zwick (University of Chicago Booth) spent years working with U.S. tax data on business owners and found a large group of wealthy Americans most of us never think about. They own beer distributorships, HVAC companies, dental practices, and auto dealerships. By the authors’ count, there are 25 ultra-rich auto dealers for every member of the Forbes 400. Zidar suggests asking…

Originally shared in our August 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Sarah Hernholm taught elementary school for years before she left in 2009 to start WIT (Whatever It Takes), a nonprofit that teaches entrepreneurial thinking to teens. Her latest piece for Forbes takes on a question that’s come up in almost every one of our partner conversations lately: what happens to the entrepreneurial mindset when AI can do the thinking for you? She argues that AI…

Originally shared in our August 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. University of Pennsylvania professor, former president of the American Psychological Association, and founder of positive psychology Martin Seligman has created some of the most lasting foundations of modern psychology. His work on learned helplessness/optimism and human flourishing have been a guiding light for our own work of understanding entrepreneurial thinking and behavior beyond traditional business-oriented definitions. Now his latest book helps us unpack how humans…

Originally shared in our July 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Writer Katy Purviance taught in a conventional classroom before founding the Spokane Learning Co-op — an outdoor, self-directed education center in Washington state. In this recent post to her Substack blog, she draws on decades of curiosity research, including work from Williams College’s Susan Engel, arriving at an uncomfortable but important claim: kids arrive at school full of questions, but that curiosity collapses within a few…