From Pitch Decks to People: Decolonizing entrepreneurship
How co-ops can help move us beyond a colonized entrepreneurship
2026:1
Moving beyond the colonial model towards participatory entrepreneurship
Quick Summary
Modern entrepreneurship replicates colonial patterns.
Three colonial tools are at play in modern entrepreneurship.
The path forward requires dismantling the hero myth, breaking information dominance, and moving beyond economic extraction.
The cooperative model offers a powerful alternative
Let’s start with the numbers. According to Shikhar Ghosh of the well-known Harvard Business School, failure rates for startups range from 30% to 95%, depending on the metric. Somehow, high failure rates are championed as a badge of honor, with entrepreneurs just told to be resilient and bounce back. Is this really success? Or, is there another problem of an elephant in the room?
What if the entrepreneurship ecosystem isn’t just flawed—but failing by actively replicating colonial patterns of extraction and domination? Perhaps that’s the elephant in the room.
In February 2026, I presented a thought piece, “Decolonising Entrepreneurship: Toward a More Inclusive Understanding of Entrepreneurial Types and Ecosystem Design,” at the International Management Conference at ASBM University in Bhubaneswar, India. The purpose of the article was to stimulate thinking about major changes in how we think about entrepreneurship. My thesis is that modern entrepreneurship is dominated by the same practices seen in 19th-century colonialism. A better option is to move towards participatory and collegial forms of entrepreneurship.
How Modern Entrepreneurship Uses Colonial Tools
Is modern entrepreneurship, which is so venerated as the fountain of eternal value in business, little more than colonial extraction? There are some indicators that colonial practices are alive and well in the startup space.
The Hero Myth Exported to Entrepreneurship
Colonial narratives centered on heroic explorers—lone figures like Columbus or Rhodes who supposedly brought progress to “backward” lands. These myths were used to systematically erase the stories of violence against existing civilizations, collective labor, and loss of indigenous knowledge.
Modern entrepreneurship replicates the colonial pattern. The obsessive focus on individual “founder heroes” serves specific colonial functions:
Erases collective contributions: Engineers, designers, early employees, and communities disappear from the story. Somehow, only one person is needed for complex innovation and business development.
Ignores existing knowledge systems: Indigenous business practices, cooperatives, and non-Western entrepreneurship are dismissed as “not real entrepreneurship.”
Naturalizes extraction: If one genius created all the value, they deserve all the rewards—even if built on public infrastructure, exploited labor, or appropriated ideas
Delegitimizes alternatives: Community-based enterprises and collective ownership appear “less entrepreneurial.” In one meeting at the school where I completed my MBA, a Swiss banker told me that any type of collective enterprise was communist.
Just as colonial heroes supposedly brought civilization to empty lands (terra nullius), entrepreneurial heroes supposedly create value from nothing, erasing all the collective infrastructure, knowledge, and labor that makes their ventures possible.
The Entrepreneurship Press: Information Dominance
Colonial powers understood that controlling information meant controlling perceptions of reality. They established publishing houses, determined what counted as “knowledge” versus “superstition,” and created educational systems that taught colonial worldviews as universal truth.
The “entrepreneurship press” functions today to control images and ideas. Business media, startup publications, accelerators, and business schools operate as a modern information dominance system that determines:
What counts as “real” entrepreneurship: Venture-backed tech startups are entrepreneurship; a family restaurant is just a “small business.”
Which metrics matter: Funding rounds and unicorn valuations are legitimate measures; community impact and sustainability are “soft” or irrelevant.
Whose stories get told: Silicon Valley founders dominate coverage; Global South entrepreneurs, women, and people of color remain invisible.
What knowledge is legitimate: MBAs focused on ideas like monetization are seen as following “best practices”; traditional business wisdom is seen as backward.
Such information control operates through media coverage that amplifies certain stories, educational curricula that teach Silicon Valley models as universal, and accelerator programs that impose standardized frameworks regardless of context.
The colonial parallel: Just as colonial education taught that European knowledge was superior, the entrepreneurship press teaches that venture capital models are the only legitimate path—regardless of cultural context or community needs.
Economic Extraction with Funding and Property Mechanisms
Colonial economic systems extracted wealth from colonized territories through resource seizure, unequal trade, property appropriation, debt bondage, and sometimes slavery.
Venture capital replicates these mechanisms. It isn’t individual bad actors, but structural design. This results are:
Venture capital as resource extraction—VCs invest in emerging markets or underserved communities, extract value through exits, and concentrate wealth with distant investors rather than communities where value was created. A significant part of the funding often comes from public sources, which are then turned to private gain.
Intellectual property as land seizure—Just as colonizers claimed communal lands as private property, IP regimes privatize collective knowledge. Traditional practices and community innovations get patented by outsiders; communities receive nothing while patent holders extract rents forever.
Funding as bondage—Venture structures force entrepreneurs to prioritize investor returns over community benefit. Even “founder-friendly” terms require exponential growth and rapid exit. Alternative models—cooperatives, community ownership, slow growth—become impossible once VC-funding enters the scene.
A geography mirroring colonialism—Venture capital is concentrated in a few wealthy cities (San Francisco, New York, London). Often, however, entrepreneurs are recruited into funding models from lower-cost geographies, yielding what is known as location arbitrage.
Exits as extraction—Portfolio economics require VCs to push for exits regardless of founder or community preferences. Successful companies must be sold to larger corporations or taken public and often removed geographically. Local ownership is systematically eliminated, and wealth leaves communities permanently.
Colonial System Tools in Entrepreneurship
These three tools reinforce each other:
The hero myth makes extraction appear deserved (”they created all the value”)
Information dominance makes the system appear natural (”this is just how entrepreneurship works”)
Economic extraction concentrates wealth and power (”success” means enriching distant investors)
This setup tends to sideline most global entrepreneurs—think lifestyle businesses, social ventures, co-ops, indigenous, and community-focused efforts—and it pulls wealth out, concentrating it in a few well-off hubs.
Decolonizing Entrepreneurship—The Way Forward
In my article, I proposed three key action areas.
Dismantle the hero myth: Highlight teams and collective contributions; promote and support cooperatives and community-owned enterprises; recognize indigenous entrepreneurship practices; challenge case studies that erase collective labor.
Break information dominance: Create alternative media for diverse entrepreneurship stories; develop pluralistic success metrics; avoid marginalizing quiet voices; legitimize diverse knowledge systems; challenge the universality of Silicon Valley frameworks, such as monetization.
Move beyond economic extraction: Develop community-owned funding mechanisms; support patient capital without extraction through exits; protect communal knowledge from IP privatization; create cooperative ownership structures; design funding that keeps wealth circulating locally.
Defining Who is Served
To move forward, we must answer a fundamental question: Who does the entrepreneurship ecosystem serve?
If it serves wealthy investors extracting value from communities worldwide—we have a colonial system.
If it serves diverse entrepreneurs building sustainable value in their communities—we have a decolonized alternative.
The dominant narrative isn’t neutral or natural. It’s a set of colonial tools that concentrates wealth while marginalizing the majority of entrepreneurs worldwide.
Decolonizing entrepreneurship means recognizing these tools, resisting their logic, and building alternatives that already exist in cooperative movements, indigenous economies, and community enterprises around the world.
The choice is ours: Continue replicating colonial patterns, or build truly inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystems that serve communities rather than extracting from them.
The Cooperative Alternative: A Promising Decolonization Model
Cooperatives offer a powerful, time-tested alternative to colonial patterns of entrepreneurship. With over 3 million cooperatives serving more than 1 billion members worldwide, the cooperative model directly counters each colonial tool.
Dispelling the hero myth. Cooperatives are inherently collective, with democratic governance and shared ownership. There is no single founder-hero; success belongs to the community of member-owners who build the enterprise together.
Moving beyond information dominance, Cooperative movements maintain their own knowledge systems, educational networks, and success metrics based on member benefit rather than investor returns. The International Cooperative Alliance’s principles provide an alternative framework to Silicon Valley orthodoxy.
Share the wealth. Cooperatives are designed to keep wealth circulating within communities. Profits are distributed to member-owners or reinvested locally, not extracted to distant investors. There are no exits—cooperatives exist to serve members indefinitely, not to enrich outside capital.
From Mondragon Corporation in Spain (employing 80,000+ worker-owners) to credit unions serving millions globally, cooperatives demonstrate that entrepreneurship can build community wealth rather than extract it. For those committed to decolonizing entrepreneurship, cooperatives aren’t just an alternative—they’re a proven path forward.
About the Research
Gilbert, D.J. (2026, Feb. 7). “Decolonising Entrepreneurship: Toward a More Inclusive Understanding of Entrepreneurial Types and Ecosystem Design.” Presented at IMCON 2026, ASBM University, India. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/401675504_From_Pitch_Decks_to_People_De-Colonising_Entrepreneurship_Beyond_Capital_and_Code
Tags: #DecolonizingEntrepreneurship #ColonialismInBusiness #CooperativeEconomics #SolidarityEconomy #ExtractiveCapitalism #AlternativeEconomies
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