Lazear (2005) suggests that entrepreneurs should be generalists, while those who work for others should be specialists. Many prospective entrepreneurs will develop varied skills by engaging in a variety of employment activities prior to become an entrepreneur, and incomes are higher for those that do so. An alternative view predicts that those with greater taste for variety are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Varied employment prior to becoming an entrepreneur is simply an expression of this taste, and is associated with lower earnings. Data from a survey of 830 independent inventors and 300 individuals from the general population are used to discriminate between these two theories. The results show that inventor-entrepreneurs typically have a more varied labor market experience, and that varied work experience is associated with lower household income. JEL Classification Codes: J24, L26.

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Crowdfunding has recently become available for entrepreneurs. Most academic studies analyse data from rewards-based (pre-selling) campaigns. In contrast, in this paper we analyse 636 campaigns, encompassing 17,188 investors and 64,831 investments between 2012 and 2015, from one of the leading European equity crowdfunding platforms. We provide descriptive statistics and carry out cross-campaign regression analysis. The descriptive statistics address its size, growth and geographic distributions in the UK. The regressions analyse which factors are associated with the probability of a successful campaign. We find some similarities and some interesting dissimilarities when comparing the descriptive statistics and regression results to research on rewards-based crowding. The data show that equity crowdfunding will likely pose great challenges to VC and business angel financiers in the near future. We discuss some research challenges and opportunities with these kind of data.