An empirical ecosystem-based study of 'making the leap' from employment to entrepreneurship

Making the leap from traditional employment to a fulltime entrepreneurial career is one of the most difficult but important decisions that entrepreneurs face. In this paper, we clarify the challenges of 'making the leap' and delineate strategies for engaging and surmounting them. Practicing entrepreneurs tend to rely on generalised social support or expert guidance from social network or the popular press. However, the helpfulness of those resources is of limited value to many entrepreneurs because almost no entrepreneurship research has examined this topic. To address the gap, we conducted in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs in Brazil's burgeoning start-up ecosystem. Each participant entrepreneur made the leap to become a founder or co-founder of a new business venture with varying levels of success. Based on QSR NVivo content analysis and axial coding, our findings revealed that success is associated with certain factors: delineating experiential wisdom and conceptual knowledge and harmonising these two types of intellectual capital, integrating technical and managerial competence as much as possible, and engaging markets and communities wholly separately. We detail the implications for practicing entrepreneurs, the organisations employing them, and for entrepreneurship research and theory.