We’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about who entrepreneurship belongs to. 

The story goes like this: an entrepreneur is a type of person. Charismatic, non-conformist, born to disrupt. They don’t get regular jobs. They become founders, raise venture capital, and either build a billion-dollar tech company or quietly disappear. The rest of us, the ones with mortgages and teams and quarterly objectives, admire them from a distance and get on with our careers. 

I want to rewrite that story, because I think it’s the single most expensive misconception in the Australian economy right now. 

“Entrepreneurship is not a person. It’s a practice. And it belongs to anyone whose job involves solving a problem that doesn’t yet have an answer.” 

Seeing entrepreneurial practice as the remit of high-growth tech founders is unhelpfully narrow. It’s also for the creative, solutions-oriented do-ers across the rest of the economy.

The… 
… sales team in a large corporate trying to unlock a new vertical 
… operations leader in an established family business trying to change the company’s corporate culture 
…. non-profit manager trialing different service offers to create the biggest impact 

And even the  
… farmer diversifying their crops to adapt to changing market conditions 
… small business owner diversifying their sales tactics to adapt to a changing market…  

“The way I see it: Entrepreneurial practice is a foundational skillset for the whole economy. If more Australians saw it that way, imagine the problems we could solve.”

I know this because I have built and exited two businesses over 12 years, but I didn’t come from a business or technical background. And the most useful thing I learned wasn’t about ‘founding’ – the ‘getting started’ part is actually the easiest. The hard, essential lessons were about the process of innovation, the everyday problem solving that comes with building a category creating business. 

The doing is the learning 

I built Neighbourlytics, a property data software platform, by accident. I was the CEO of a not-for-profit at the time, and I entered a startup pitch competition not really knowing what a startup was.

The pitch was a problem I’d been quietly furious about since my first year as a town planner: your postcode is more likely to determine your life expectancy than your genetic code, and yet the property industry was making decisions about neighbourhoods using census data that was often years out of date by the time it landed. We pitched a big idea. We won the competition. We raised capital. We scaled across 12 countries. 

Eight years later, REA Group acquired the company. If you had asked me at the start whether I was capable of building a software company, I would have said no. I had no tech background. Who am I to just decide I’m capable of building a software company? It felt indulgent to even try. But what I didnt realise back then, is that I’ve always been an innovator, I just didn’t think I had the permission to start.  

The best work is done at the edge of what you know 

Which brings me to the second thing I learned, the one I most want to leave you with. 

The best work is done at the edge of what you know. The work that creates new value. The work that moves an industry. The work that changes anyone’s life. None of it sits in your comfort zone. Not where you’re already an expert. At the edge, where you can still see your competence on the horizon behind you but where the next step is honestly unfamiliar. 

That edge feels like discomfort. It feels like 2am, the way I used to feel it: am I right? Have I drunk my own Kool-Aid? It feels like the entirely reasonable internal voice telling you that you are not qualified for what you are about to attempt. I knew nothing about tech. I’d never run a software company. Who am I to do this? 

The trick is recognising that the discomfort is the signal, not the warning. If the work you are doing feels entirely comfortable, you are not at the edge. You are somewhere safe and familiar, doing work that almost certainly someone else could do too. The value is at the edge. The novelty is at the edge. The growth is at the edge. And, counterintuitively, so is the safety, because the only people whose careers are genuinely future-proof in 2026 are the ones who have practised working in places they don’t already understand.

This is what we are signalling when we say Ready never comes. Not “be reckless.” Not “ignore the risks.” We mean: the feeling of being ready is not coming. Not the feeling of having full knowledge. Not the feeling of having everyone agree. Not the feeling of being beyond reasonable doubt. None of it is coming. If you wait for it, the work doesn’t happen. The thing that you can see needs to exist doesn’t get built. You stay in the centre. The edge stays empty.     

The senior leaders who call me 

In the four months since Neighbourlytics’ acquisition closed, I’ve taken a dozen calls from senior leaders at major Australian property firms. Multi-million dollar budgets, deep networks, real organisational authority. They tell me they’ve got an idea, and they’re asking for my help to make it happen. They want to innovate, but they don’t know where to start. 

What’s fascinating is that I seem to be the only person they can think of to call. These are not people short on resource. They are people short on permission, and a way of working that gives them the right to act. And they’re making the mistake of thinking that they have to have the path planned out ahead, before they’re ready to take the first step.

A lot of them are now thinking about leaving their jobs to go and do it elsewhere, to start startups, not because being a founder is what they actually want, but because the system they sit inside doesn’t give them the framing, the cover, or the toolkit to do entrepreneurial work where they are. That’s a loss for them, and a much bigger loss for their industry, because every time a great corporate innovator leaves to start a startup, the corporate they left doesn’t get better. It just gets older. 

This is the part of the story we’re getting wrong. Entrepreneurship isn’t a destination people graduate to once they’ve earned their stripes. It’s a way of working they should have been allowed to use the whole time. 

Why this matters more now than ever 

Until about two years ago, you could make a respectable argument that this was an interesting philosophical point but not a practical one. Most large organisations could plod along on the same operating assumptions they’d held for a decade and still earn a profit. 

That window has closed. The world has changed too fast for anyone to be ready.

Generative AI has collapsed the cost of execution. The proof of concept that took me six months to build at Neighbourlytics can now be assembled in a weekend using AI tools. When the biggest frictions in buihas moved. The winner is no longer the best executor. The winner is the best tactician. Someone who can hold a clear strategy, decide what to test next, kill the wrong answer faster, and tell the difference between a real signal and their own confirmation bias.

That is entrepreneurial practice. That is the toolkit. And it is now the single most useful skill set you can carry into the next decade of work, regardless of whether you ever start a company. 

What’s fascinating is that I seem to be the only person they can think of to call. These are not people short on resource. They are people short on permission, and a way of working that gives them the right to act. And they’re making the mistake of thinking that they have to have the path planned out ahead, before they’re ready to take the first step.

A lot of them are now thinking about leaving their jobs to go and do it elsewhere, to start startups, not because being a founder is what they actually want, but because the system they sit inside doesn’t give them the framing, the cover, or the toolkit to do entrepreneurial work where they are. That’s a loss for them, and a much bigger loss for their industry, because every time a great corporate innovator leaves to start a startup, the corporate they left doesn’t get better. It just gets older. 

This is the part of the story we’re getting wrong.  Entrepreneurship isn’t a destination people graduate to once they’ve earned their stripes. It’s a way of working they should have been allowed to use the whole time. 

What I want for the next decade 

I came to the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship after Neighbourlytics because I believe the next ten years are going to be defined by how many people we hand this practice to. 

Not just founders. Especially not just founders. 

We’re calling the campaign Ready Never Comes because there is no permission slip coming. Nobody is going to grant you ready. You either go anyway, or you stay. And “going anyway” doesn’t necessarily mean quitting your job to start a company. It might. It also might mean staying exactly where you are and using a different toolkit. 

Ready never comes.

Good.

Because the best things we’ve ever done started before we were ready.

The investor who backed belief over proof.

The leader who changed the business from the inside.

The educator who threw out the syllabus.

All of them were restless.

None of them were ready.

Ready never comes.

Start with Wade.

If you’re in any of those rooms right now, and most of us are in at least one, the work has already begun. Come find us. 

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Jess Christiansen-Franks is Managing Director of the Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship at Ormond College, University of Melbourne. Previously she was co-founder and CEO of Neighbourlytics (acquired by REA Group). She talked with Madeleine Hanger (Grummet) about all of this in the first episode of Wade In Conversations: “Entrepreneurship is everyone’s business”, out now.