What If We’ve Been Thinking About This All Wrong?
A thought experiment on entrepreneurship, the commons, and what we might build instead
There is a particular quality of thought that arrives in the space between sleep and waking. The mind is still loose, not yet armoured by the demands of the day, and sometimes an idea slips through that the fully conscious brain would have screened out as impractical or naïve. This piece began in that state, somewhere around six in the morning, with a single question forming before I was alert enough to dismiss it.
What if we are approaching entrepreneurship the wrong way?
I want to invite you to follow that question with me, not as a critique but as an exploration. There is something worth examining in how we have come to understand what entrepreneurship is, who it is for, and what it is supposed to accomplish. And I think the examination leads somewhere genuinely hopeful.
The Story We Tell
The dominant narrative of entrepreneurship goes something like this: an individual, armed with an idea and sheer determination, builds something from nothing and changes the world. Risk everything. Move fast. Win.
It is a powerful story. It is also a specifically American one.
The lone genius in the garage, the founder who sleeps on the office floor, the hustle culture that treats rest as a competitive disadvantage. These are cultural artefacts of a particular time and place, not universal laws of value creation. They emerged from a tradition that celebrates individual achievement above almost everything else, and they have been exported so effectively through Silicon Valley mythology that much of the world now treats them as simply how entrepreneurship works.
But other societies have built other models, and some of those models have proven remarkably durable.
Québec is a case worth examining closely, and not only because it is where I live and work. Before the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, the Catholic Church in Québec was not simply a moral institution. It was an economic and social infrastructure system. It built hospitals, schools, social services, and credit networks across a society that larger financial institutions largely ignored. The caisse populaire movement, launched by Alphonse Desjardins at his kitchen table in Lévis in 1900, was explicitly inspired by Catholic social teaching on mutual aid, solidarity, and the understanding that individuals cannot flourish without a substrate of shared support. Desjardins built a financial institution for working-class French Canadians who were being turned away by conventional banks, governed by the people it served, accountable to the community it existed within.
That was not charity. It was entrepreneurship. And it outlasted almost everything built by conventional means in the same era.
The Quiet Revolution transferred much of the Church’s institutional role to the Québec state, but the cooperative impulse survived and evolved. Today, it finds expression in what Québec formally recognizes as the économie sociale, a sector of over 11,200 collective enterprises generating more than $47 billion in revenues and employing over 220,000 people, legally defined by the Loi sur l’économie sociale passed in 2013.
And yet these enterprises are almost universally treated as orbiting the mainstream entrepreneurship ecosystem rather than belonging to it. They are the lesser children — earnest, admirable perhaps, but not quite serious. Not quite real. The real entrepreneurs are over there, pitching to venture capital, chasing unicorn valuations, playing the game as it is supposed to be played.
That condescension is worth examining, because it reveals something important about what we assume entrepreneurship is for. And it points directly to what every entrepreneur, conventional or cooperative, depends on to build anything at all.
The Invisible Substrate
Every entrepreneur inherits two things before they write a single line of code, turn a single screw, or sign a single client.
The first is common wealth: the accumulated infrastructure of society that makes economic activity possible. Roads, universities, the internet, electrical grids, public health systems, generations of scientific research, the educated workforce produced by all of it. None of this was built by founders. It was built collectively, over long periods, through shared investment and shared will. It is the soil in which every venture takes root.
The second is common rights: the trust framework that makes coordination between strangers possible at all. Contract law. Financial systems. The reasonable expectation that an agreement will be honoured. The social norms that have been negotiated and reinforced over centuries. A startup that raises a seed round is drawing on a legal infrastructure it did not build. A founder who closes a partnership is relying on a social contract she inherited. The handshake means something because generations of people agreed that it should.
Common wealth and common rights are the invisible substrate of all entrepreneurship. They are what makes the venture possible. They are what makes it trustworthy. And in the conventional startup narrative, they are almost never acknowledged.
The économie sociale enterprises, the ones dismissed as lesser children, tend to acknowledge the substrate explicitly. That is partly why they look different from the outside. They are not ignoring what they have been given.
A Substrate Under Strain
Here is what makes this more than a philosophical observation. The commons are fragile. In many parts of the world right now, they are under active strain.
The trust frameworks that entrepreneurs depend on — stable institutions, reliable legal systems, functioning social contracts — do not maintain themselves. They require ongoing collective investment and collective will. When that investment falters, when institutions erode and social contracts fray, the substrate on which entrepreneurship depends begins to thin.
This is where BANI conditions make the stakes genuinely urgent. A world that is Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible is also one in which the commons face compounding pressure. The instability that makes entrepreneurship harder is partly a consequence of a substrate that is drawn from without being replenished. Founders building today are not drawing on a stable given. They are drawing on something that may not be there for the next generation of founders unless someone tends it.
That reframes stewardship from a pleasant orientation to a strategic necessity.
The Inversion
So what does entrepreneurship look like when it begins with that acknowledgment?
Not philanthropy. Not corporate social responsibility deployed as a marketing exercise. Something more structural — ventures designed, from their inception, to strengthen the substrate they depend on rather than merely consume it. The commitment is built into the architecture, not left to the founder’s goodwill.
This is where the lesser children turn out to have something to teach the mainstream. The cooperative model, the B-corporation framework, the économie sociale tradition: these are not softer versions of entrepreneurship. They are attempts, some more successful than others, to encode the reciprocal relationship between the venture and its commons into the structure of the enterprise itself. Desjardins understood this in 1900. The institution he founded is now one of the largest financial cooperatives in the world, suggesting the model is not merely admirable but competitive.
The tension is real. Commons-oriented ventures face constant pressure from the extractive logic surrounding them. Success has a way of pulling even the most principled organization toward conventional metrics. Whether Desjardins at $400 billion still carries the spirit of 1900 is a fair question. The lesson is not that these models are perfect. It is that the orientation, when structural rather than merely cultural, has a fighting chance of surviving contact with scale.
What is striking, though, is how far the legal architecture has lagged behind the intention. Some jurisdictions have begun to close that gap. The United Kingdom created the Community Interest Company in 2005, a for-profit structure designed specifically for ventures whose purpose is community benefit rather than shareholder return. France went further with the société à mission, introduced by the Loi PACTE in 2019, which allows a company to embed its social purpose directly into its corporate statutes and establishes a supervisory committee to hold it accountable over time. In Canada, British Columbia and Nova Scotia have developed comparable hybrid structures at the provincial level.
A Provocation from the 24th Century
Now, bear with me here, as my half-awake mind wanders further.
In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the Federation of the 24th century has solved scarcity. Not by perfecting extraction, but by agreeing collectively to treat the commons as worth maintaining. Jean-Luc Picard tends a vineyard in Burgundy not because it is profitable but because the work itself matters to him. Nobody is monetizing warp drive. The point of the venture is the voyage.
It is science fiction. But useful fiction holds a mirror up to the present, and what this particular mirror reflects is striking. How much of what we call entrepreneurial ambition is actually scarcity behaviour dressed up as vision? How much of the hunger to capture, to dominate, to exit at the highest possible multiple, is driven not by what founders want to build but by what they are afraid of losing?
Post-scarcity, as an orientation rather than an economic reality, asks a different opening question. Not “how do I capture value?” but “what am I genuinely able to contribute, and to whom?”
How Would You Build If You Weren’t Afraid?
The 21st-century entrepreneurship model is not a new process or a better programme. It is not a reimagined accelerator or a more efficient pitch competition. It is an orientation that begins with a different relationship to the commons.
When founders recognize what they have inherited, they build differently. They design their ventures to return something to the system that made them possible. They measure success not only by what they capture but by what they leave behind. They build organizations that last.
This is not a softer version of entrepreneurship. It is the more demanding one, requiring a clearer sense of purpose, a longer time horizon, and a willingness to resist the theatre and its rewards.
Consider the language we use. The standard business school definition of a business model organizes itself around three verbs: create value, deliver value, and capture value. That last word has always said more than it intends to. Capture implies something that must be seized before it escapes — value taken from a system that would not otherwise yield it willingly. What if that third verb were different? Harvest, perhaps — a word that acknowledges the commons that produced the value in the first place, and carries within it the farmer’s quiet obligation to maintain the land that feeds him. And if harvest opens the door, replenish walks through it.
The Japanese have a word for it. Shinise describes a company that has operated for generations, sometimes centuries, sustained not by dominance but by deep-rootedness in its community and an unbroken sense of purpose. Japan has more century-old companies than any other country in the world. Their longevity is not accidental. These are businesses that optimized not for the exit but for the continuity, built on the understanding that the venture exists within a community, draws from it, and owes something back to it. The oldest of them, a temple construction company called Kongō Gumi, operated for over 1,400 years. Not because it was the most aggressive competitor in its market. Because it tended what it had been given.
In a world where the commons itself is under strain, a venture that is woven into a community of mutual benefit, oriented toward contribution rather than conquest, rooted rather than merely positioned, has a structural advantage that no pitch deck or venture raise can manufacture.
How would you build if the goal were not to win, but to replenish?
Davender’s passion is to guide innovative entrepreneurs in developing the clarity, commitment, confidence and courage to enter, engage and lead their markets in a world that refuses to hold still, by thinking strategically and acting tactically.
Find out more at https://coachdavender.substack.com/about and https://linkedin.com/in/coachdavender