More and more MBA students are choosing to major in entrepreneurship, rather than the traditional disciplines of finance and marketing.

How has entrepreneurship changed over the past century-and-a-half? Or has it changed? Consider the examples of Steve Jobs and Ezra Cornell.

Everyone knows about Steve Jobs, the inspiration and driving force behind Apple Inc., one of the most successful startups of all time. Less well known today is Ezra Cornell, a co-founder of The Western Union Telegraph Company in 1855, where he earned the fortune that provided the basis for the founding of Cornell University.

Despite the differences in time frames, there are some interesting similarities between these two hugely successful entrepreneurs.

Modest beginnings

Both men were born in modest circumstances and spent the first years of their adult life searching for direction. Steve Jobs attended Reed College for only a few months, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s dorm room, before departing for seven months to India, where he became a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism. Ezra Cornell worked as a carpenter and mechanic in Ithaca, NY before being laid off at age 30 during the Panic of 1837.

Communications pioneers

Both were pioneers in the communications business. Although Apple was founded as a computer company, its products today—the iPhone, iPad and even the iMac—are increasingly focused on communication via the Internet. And Western Union, formed by consolidating regional telegraph companies, grew to more than a million miles of telegraph lines by 1900, providing nearly instantaneous communications for the first time from coast to coast.

A successful communications business has an interesting and beneficial economic characteristic: increasing returns to scale. The more people who sign up, the more people who can be contacted, which makes the service more valuable to each individual user, which attracts even more customers. Engineers call this a positive feedback loop.

Non-technical background

Neither was a trained scientist or engineer. Rather they built on someone else’s inventions, extending and simplifying them for use by the average person. The first Macintosh computer was promoted as “the computer for the rest of us.” Steve Jobs encountered many of the concepts that distinguished the first Macintosh computer—icons, the bit-mapped screen, word processing, the mouse—when he toured Xerox’s PARC laboratory in 1979. According to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, "Steve didn't ever code. He wasn't an engineer…" But he had the vision of what the computer could become and the drive to make it happen.

Apple Macintosh Computer

Apple Macintosh Computer

Similarly, Ezra Cornell had the vision to see the potential for Samuel Morse’s patented telegraph machine as the basis for a vast network that could communicate over long distances, in his words, “at lightning speed.” His first involvement with the telegraph was to develop a special horse-drawn plow that could dig a trench for buried telegraph lines—a concept that proved impractical when the insulation on the wires broke down underground. Later he owned a regional telegraph company that became part of Western Union, which he co-founded and became the largest stockholder.

Major setbacks

Both men faced major setbacks that would have ended most careers. Steve Jobs’ first computer using the new concepts from PARC was the Lisa, which at a price of $9995 was a commercial failure. Jobs tried again, this time with the Macintosh, which was highly successful. But later in a corporate power struggle he was fired by Apple, whereupon he founded Next Computer in 1985, whose product gained very limited acceptance. But the Unix-based operating system for the Next Computer became the platform for part of the new Apple OS X operating system when Jobs rejoined Apple in 1997.

Ezra Cornell’s involvement with the telegraph could have ended with the failure of the concept of underground telegraph lines. Worse yet, the first telegraph line opened to the public was a financial failure. When the first commercial line was opened for public business between Washington and Baltimore, the price was set at one penny for four characters sent. At the end of the first four days, it had taken in one cent. On the fifth day it took in twelve and a half cents, and by the ninth day it had taken in $1.04. After three months it had taken in only $193.56.