How 'Unlikely Entrepreneurs' Came to Be

Tomorrow is launch day!

Before the HBS event, the press interviews, and the Amazon reviews start rolling in, we wanted to share something with you: the people who believed in this book before it was real.

This is the story of how Unlikely Entrepreneurs came to be. And it starts with Patricia's father.

Patricia's dad never finished high school. He worked as an auto mechanic in North Central Massachusetts, and he was gifted. Not just at fixing cars, but at seeing how things could be better.

He'd look at a tool, use it for a while, then redesign it. Improve the grip. Adjust the angle. Make it faster, more efficient. His workbench was filled with modified tools that worked better than anything you could buy.

But he never sought a patent. He never showed them to anyone who might see their potential. They were just his tools, for his work.

Years later, he was reading the local newspaper, like he did every morning. He stopped on an article about an entrepreneur who'd launched a company selling specially designed tools — tools that looked a lot like the ones sitting in his garage.

"I've created tools just like that," he said quietly.

Then he folded the newspaper, set it down, and headed out to his weekend job pumping gas at a nearby station.

He never brought it up again.

That moment stayed with Patricia for decades.

Through her work in media relations at MIT Sloan, she spent years surrounded by entrepreneurship: promoting MBA startups, writing about competition winners, and working with faculty on books about building companies. She'd helped promote Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet, one of the best-selling books on startups.

Eventually, she developed her own business idea. She wrote a business plan, created a logo, and did the research.

But she couldn't pull the trigger. Something held her back… maybe the same thing that held her father back.

And then, just like him, she read about a startup pursuing the same idea.

She was frustrated. Not at the other founders — at herself. But instead of folding the newspaper and moving on, she asked a different question:

There have to be entrepreneurs out there who felt the same doubts. Who lacked the connections, the confidence, the "right" background, but took the plunge anyway.

What made them different? What did they know that my father didn't? That I didn't?

She wanted to find them. She wanted to learn from them. And she thought their stories might help others who were stuck in the same place.

In 2022, Patricia reached out to Lou.

They had collaborated at MIT Sloan on a few opinion pieces, which Patricia pitched to business publications. She knew Lou had a different kind of entrepreneurial background. He'd worked at six startups, run three as CEO, and taught entrepreneurship at both MIT and Harvard Business School for nearly two decades. He wasn't just an academic… he'd lived it, failed at it, and succeeded at it.

Patricia pitched Lou an idea: a book about unlikely entrepreneurs. People who didn't fit the mold but built something anyway. It turned out Lou knew several of them personally from his years in the startup world as a builder, teacher, advisor, and investor.

We decided to try something. We wrote three entrepreneur profiles together. No book deal. No publisher. No real direction. Just three stories of unlikely founders and the lessons they learned. It turned out Lou knew several of them personally from his years in the startup world as a builder, teacher, advisor, and investor.

That marked the start of our writing journey.

We liked what we had. Lou suggested showing them to Harvard Business School Publishing. "I know somebody there," he said.

Their response surprised us: "This is great. You need to write a full book proposal."

That proposal nearly broke us.

Four months of work. Plotting every chapter. Identifying the entrepreneurs we'd profile and the experts we'd interview. Writing a detailed marketing plan. It was a beast, but it became the backbone of everything that followed.

Some entrepreneurs made the cut. Others didn't. The structure changed. We added chapters, cut sections, rewrote entire profiles. We interviewed seventeen founders across industries and backgrounds, from a typewriter repairman who built a $3 billion company, to a man who sold caskets online, to Katie Couric.

We wove in insights from Lou's HBS classroom, from MIT Sloan research, and from venture capitalists, angel investors and CEOs who'd been through it themselves.

And now, two years later, the book is real.

Patricia held a finished copy last week. "It's wild," she said on our team call. "From idea to... this is a tangible thing now."

You're receiving this because you're one of the people who believed in this project before it existed. You subscribed. Many of you pre-ordered. Some of you have been cheering us on for months.

Tomorrow, we officially launch Unlikely Entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School.

Here's how you can help make launch week a success:

And if you haven’t ordered the book yet, you can do so here! Get the Book

Patricia's father had the ideas. He had the talent. He just didn't have someone to show him it was possible.

We wrote this book so that the next person with a folded newspaper and a dream has somewhere to turn.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

— Lou and Patricia