Nonsense, Henry Ford invented the Model T invention at home working nights while he was by day working for the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit, a company founded by the inventor of the light bulb, who himself invented it while burning midnight oil at home. It was clearly motivated and capitalized by the patent system and an effort to earn a profit. That is entrepreneurship.

https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/model-t

I would argue that businesses that were founded before bankruptcy law in 1898 were far more risky than modern ventures. In addition, there were no social safety nets to pick you back up if ended up impoverished in the 1890s. But that's quite a tangent from the core overarching theme of the modern era, in which entrepreneurial economies have consistently beat out command and control economies.

The main difference between today and 100 years ago, is now we have an abundance of capital. It was much, much harder to get capital back then. Even loans for houses were hard to come by.

>I would argue that businesses that were founded before bankruptcy law in 1898 were far more risky than modern ventures

For the individuals themselves possibly, not for the business model, because the high risk business model of today did not exist. In your own examples Both Ford and Edison worked on their inventions as a side hustle in addition to their regular jobs. They were not professional entrepreneurs when they worked on original inventions.

In fact this is almost necessarily true for any paradigm changing invention, it happens outside the status quo. As Schumpeter pointed out, as soon as someone is drawn into a formal mode of invention they're just replicating, not jumping ahead of what came before. Every truly important invention is entirely original almost by definition.

The defining feature of entrepreneurship today is that it is like a Keynesian beauty contest. You check a few boxes and we give X dollars for Y shares and we show you "how to do" entrepreneurship.

I’m not sure why you’re conflating entrepreneurship with Silicon Valley-style VC.

because we're in the comment chain about wirecard and their behaviour is the result of that sort of culture. It's also still, despite the immense criticism touted around the world as something to emulate. You see billions of cash pumped into say, 'incubators' in Paris and other large cities around the globe with for the most part no results.

Wirecard is a financial services provider founded in 1999. I would not conflate their troubles with marginal contributions from start-up incubators that are chasing diminishing returns in the tech sector. The latter is just a result of a normal market cycle. Clearly, plenty of multimillion and multibillion dollar companies have been founded from start-ups in the past decade or two. And clearly we're reaching a point where it's more challenging to make a hit. That's ok, that's normal. Same thing happened in the auto industry 100 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man...

Look at all those manufacturers you never heard of.