Saplings: The World Outside

Friends,

Dave Thomas had a confession to make: He was just fourteen.

Two years earlier, Thomas had come to Regas Restaurant in Knoxville, Tennessee, asking for a job at the counter. He’d told the owner he was sixteen. He was, in fact, twelve.

Money hadn’t been the only thing that motivated Thomas, though it mattered. Thomas harbored dreams of owning a restaurant of his own one day.

Working at Regas had not been easy, especially as a child. It stayed open 24 hours a day, and as an entry-level employee, Thomas was often given the overnight shift. At two in the morning, he’d find himself making hundreds of egg, ham, and tuna sandwiches for the day ahead. It got harder after the family moved to Oak Ridge, which added a bus commute to Thomas’s schedule. He eventually persuaded his parents to let him rent a room near the restaurant to cut down his commute, paying the $7 weekly rent from his own wages. He did all this while attending school, working at the Regas on weekends and during summer breaks.

That schedule had worn on him. “I was physically tired,” Thomas recalled, “but most of all I was tired of having lied to the people at the Regas who had done so much to give me a chance.”

So one night, exhausted, he broke down and told the truth, informing his manager of his real age. Gene surprised him with his response: they’d always suspected as much. “But you had such determination,” he added. “We just decided to let it go.”

Thomas would achieve his dream. On November 15, 1969, he opened the first Wendy’s restaurant, naming it after his young daughter. Today, Wendy’s is one of the world’s largest restaurant chains, with thousands of locations across 30 countries.

At first glance, Thomas’s confession is a classic founder’s tale. Here is the striving outsider, the child with holes in his shoes, working his way to the top and enduring pain others will not. It tells us something about Thomas in this way, showing us who he was as a child. More was expected of him, and he expected more of himself.

But there is something else to it, too. It reveals something about Thomas, yes, but about the world, as well. How feeble its rules can be, how hackable the system is if it finds something it needs or wants.

In the first two parts of Saplings, we focused on the ways in which life happened to legendary future founders. How did their surroundings cast them as outsiders? What impact did their family dynamic have on their ambition?

In Part III, the final part of our series, we will switch the focus, studying what came after. In particular, we will examine the patterns of how future entrepreneurs engage with the world around them, assessing how they acquire new information, take their first steps in the commercial world, clash with authority, and invent an adult identity.

• Self-directed learners. When the world does not provide the desired education, the founder creates it for themselves.

• Early to business. Ambition or circumstance pushes founders into the working world early, exposing them to industry and new responsibilities.

• Skeptical of authority. School teachers, bosses, and the rules they impose are questioned and flouted as founders take risks and test the resilience of the systems around them.

• Self-inventors. Founders see their capabilities and even their histories as malleable, evolving to meet circumstances.

As you will know by now, Saplings does not purport to explain everything about the individuals featured, or imagine that its observations are necessary to achieve entrepreneurial greatness. It does not attempt to make statistical observations or generalize across these populations. Rather, it is an accounting of the common patterns I find most meaningful, accompanied by my interpretation of them. Across the series, the goal is to study the formative years of extraordinary figures so as to better understand them, knowing that full understanding is not possible.

You can find Part I: Outsiders here, Part II: Unstable Ground here, and a discussion of our methodology here.

Self-directed learners

Some founders, like Colin Huang of Pinduoduo or Stripe’s Patrick Collison, excelled in academic environments. Others, like Richard Branson of Virgin or Fanatics’ Michael Rubin, struggled with traditional schooling. “I haven’t read a book since ninth grade,” Rubin confessed. “You send me three paragraphs. I’m tuned out before I start.”

Though we can make no statistical claims, anecdotal evidence does seem to cluster around the extremes. There are the super-achievers on one side and scholastic catastrophes on the other. It’s genuinely surprising to see how many founders were not simply middling students, but disastrous ones.

On the mathematics portion of the gaokao, for instance, China’s intense university entrance exam, Jack Ma scored 1 out of 120. The second time he took it, he improved markedly but still failed, logging an abysmal 19 out of 120. He passed on the third attempt, finally gaining acceptance to college.

Akio Morita, the future founder of Sony, ranked 180th in a class of 250 students as a middle-schooler. Only after a year of study with private tutors was he accepted to the science department of a prestigious high school. He was reportedly the “lowest-ranking graduate” ever to make that leap.

There is no one type of mind, or single sort of student, that predicts an exceptional entrepreneur.

There is, however, a pattern across these and other archetypes: self-directed learning. Whether their ambient environment supplies the right intellectual influences or not, founders go out and build the curriculum they want for themselves. They may do so unconsciously, and often it will look like play.

As a boy in Houston, Howard Hughes built a wireless radio set from old doorbell parts and other scraps. When he was refused a motorcycle, he decided to build one himself, strapping a car motor to his bicycle. Little stood between Hughes and his desire to learn and build.

A four-year-old Vitalik Buterin’s favorite toy was already the computer. His father recalled a young Vitalik spending his afternoon experimenting with shapes and colors in Microsoft Paint and plugging different formulas into Excel...