I Want to Start a Business but I'm a Coward.

I Want to Start a Business but I'm a Coward is part of Diego Segura's I Want to Start a Business series, so it checks one reason for not starting against the evidence.

You have called yourself a coward, probably late at night, and nobody has ever checked whether it is true.

In 2024 the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that among people looking straight at a good opportunity, 47 per cent would not start a business, for fear it might fail. Thomas Aquinas argued that fear is a fault only when it drives you from something reason says you should face.

Eleven chapters, each ending in one evening's work: the estimated 1,500 Americans who died on the road after September 2001 avoiding the sky, the law in your own country that says what really happens when a business cannot pay, and the experiment in which the founders trained hardest to test their ideas were the likeliest to shut them down. You will not lose the fear. You will know which parts of it are telling the truth.