9 Questions for Wharton’s Lori Rosenkopf about Her Book, Unstoppable Entrepreneurs

When trailblazers like Lori Rosenkopf, the vice dean of entrepreneurship and a professor of management at the Wharton School, have led robust 30-year careers and engaged with some 20,000 students, it’s hard to envision what might be next. That’s why hearing Dr. Rosenkopf (pictured above) describe the publication of her new book Unstoppable Entrepreneurs as “amazing, wonderful and something new for me,” seems all the sweeter.

Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, released in April 2025 by Wharton School Press, drills down into a collective entrepreneurship case study to reveal insights that are open to anyone with the drive to create value through innovation. The book details seven distinct entrepreneurial paths, from disruptors to intrapreneurs, supported by the stories of actual business pioneers, most of whom are Wharton graduates.

Wharton Global Youth connected with Professor Rosenkopf, whose day job is to represent how Wharton thinks about entrepreneurship, to step inside her Unstoppable Entrepreneurs journey, from process through publication, and take away some of her most valuable entrepreneurship insights.

Wharton Global Youth Program: Why did you decide to write this book now?

Lori Rosenkopf: Role models matter. In my role as vice dean of entrepreneurship and faculty director at Venture Lab [the entrepreneurship center at the Wharton School that serves all students and alumni across the University of Pennsylvania], I see tons of our students and many of our alumni who are interested in so many different industries and pathways. The pervasive start-up stereotype in the media of that college dropout, venture-backed unicorn is so rare and not the best inspiration for the vast majority of people who want to do entrepreneurial things. There is so much more to the story.

Wharton Global Youth: When did you first begin the book process and how quickly did it come together?

Dr. Rosenkopf: It was October of 2023, and I was moderating a panel for Wharton’s Executive MBA reunion weekend. I interviewed three amazing entrepreneurs. I do these sorts of panels very frequently because of my role. Afterward, the vice dean of WEMBA came up to me and said, ‘You should write a book.’ It wasn’t two hours later, when I was driving home in the car, that the apple fell on my head. I do have to write this book! I’ve been walking around for two years in my role as vice dean of entrepreneurship saying, we have to get the Wharton narrative out there. And lo and behold, this is the way to do it. I signed my contract with Wharton School Press in February 2024, the manuscript deadline was September 2024, and here we are. It came together really quickly because so much of it was in me.

“We all have the capacity to be entrepreneurial.” –Dr. Lori Rosenkopf, the Wharton School

Wharton Global Youth: Can you offer a quick overview of the seven entrepreneurship paths you outline in the book?

Dr. Rosenkopf: We begin with a disruptor, because that is the stereotype in the media. I feature a disruptor who shatters the stereotype because she’s not a guy in tech and her business is hair color. It’s Amy Errett of Madison Reed, which is essentially a unicorn at this point. Then we go on to the bootstrapper, the person who starts a business without using equity funding or debt and builds up from nothing. I focus on the social entrepreneur, because many entrepreneurs, especially young people, have social goals alongside their financial goals. I focus on a technology commercializer, which is someone who takes existing technology and figures out how to market it and capture some value from it. Then we write about the funder — this is a massively important one. So many Wharton and Penn grads have founded firms as either venture capitalists or other sorts of alternative investments and they’re not always held up as founders, but they’re going through all the same activities. Then I have the acquirer. Entrepreneurship through acquisition is really growing, and it’s a less risky and more profitable way to be the head of a business if you can find the right company. And then I focus on the intrapreneur, the person who’s doing entrepreneurial things from within an organization. So, they’re building out some new business for their company. And they’re doing it with their employer’s resources, so they have less risk. Of course, they’re also capturing less of the returns. The book provides a lot of variety beyond that traditional model of the venture-backed unicorn. There are more paths, but I only had room for seven in the book. The purpose of the book is not to tell people exactly how to do these things, but instead to inspire them. If you’re innovative, you can be entrepreneurial.

Wharton Global Youth: How do you define ‘Unstoppable Entrepreneur?’

Dr. Rosenkopf: The entrepreneurial mindset that I offer involves six R’s, and one of them is resilience. Unstoppable just sounds so much sexier than resilient entrepreneurs, right? Resilience is the ability to roll with the punches, to have the growth mindset or the grit to push through. You need to recognize that any entrepreneurial pathway is going to be filled with negative feedback. You have to learn to treat it as a gift and a learning experience. This allows you to keep adjusting and pivoting whatever it is that you’re offering and serve a large market. You must also adapt to the crises that are out of your control.

Wharton Global Youth: Can you give an example of an unstoppable entrepreneur you interviewed?

Dr. Rosenkopf: Katlyn Grasso, [founder of GenHERation] is my social entrepreneur in the book. She was running bus trips for girls to learn about career opportunities – and then COVID hit. Well, bye, bye, bus-tour business. This becomes the moment for her, when she converts to virtual content, that she realizes she is in education technology and can scale this infinitely greater than she could scale her bus business. Now, she sells curricula to schools and corporations, she’s merchandising, and she’s got a nice flywheel going. She responded to that COVID dire threat to her business with a pivot that allowed her to grow all the more. The entrepreneurs’ stories in my book are filled with these kinds of moments. (Click HERE for an interview with Katlyn Grasso as a Wharton undergrad from our Wharton Global Youth archives].

Wharton Global Youth: Did anything surprise you during your research?

Dr. Rosenkopf: One thing that was really surprising to me was how evenly this set of entrepreneurs split between two types. One group had this burning passion to solve a problem from a young age and the others were accidental entrepreneurs who never had it in their plan. They ran into a problem along the way and wound up building a business to solve it.

Wharton Global Youth: Do you have a favorite story from the book?

Dr. Rosenkopf: It’s very hard to choose. I love the story of my bootstrapper, Jesse Pujji, who got suspended as a kid for bringing his Halloween candy to school and reselling it. Jesse actually did LBW [Leadership in the Business World] in high school and met two guys there and they became friends. They all came to Wharton as undergrads and graduated in 2006. They swore they were going to start a business, but first worked for companies for a few years. Then they came back after they’d saved a little money and threw themselves into building a company, any kind of company. They just wanted to do something entrepreneurial together. They wound up in digital marketing, and they were one of the first ones into Facebook’s API. So, they started figuring out how to target us with all those ads on the Facebook pages. The tech firms were hiring them. Jesse built out a big business [Ampush], and ultimately, he sold it for eight figures.

Wharton Global Youth: What have you learned about the power of storytelling?

Dr. Rosenkopf: I used to think of stories merely as anecdotes that might give a little supporting quote in a more academic piece. I’ve come to understand how many more people are compelled by a story than an aggregated statistic. With stories, we don’t only have the steps that they took, but we have all of the psychology and resilience. Stories are also connected to the importance of role models. Great research shows that when you expose females to female entrepreneurial role models, they feel more efficacious. They have more ideas. They get moving on them more quickly. I wanted this set of role models to inspire a wide and varied population, just like the students and the alumni we serve.

Wharton Global Youth: What do you hope your readers take away from Unstoppable Entrepreneurs?

Dr. Rosenkopf: I want people to walk away from this book understanding that anyone can be an entrepreneur. We all have the capacity to be entrepreneurial. My definition of entrepreneurship is simply value creation through innovation. We’re already being innovative – maybe not in our workplace or designing new businesses yet — but we’re all trying to improve in our personal lives and thinking about the ways to create value in our communities. The recognition of that is incredibly important, because it inspires us to say, how can I do more? My goal is for people to realize, I’m already being entrepreneurial, and I want to be more entrepreneurial. Now I see it’s not a one-size-fits-all path. There are so many different ways that I can do this.

Conversation Starters

What does entrepreneurship mean to you other than just starting a business?

Dr. Rosenkopf says, “You need to recognize that any entrepreneurial pathway is going to be filled with negative feedback. You have to learn to treat it as a gift and a learning experience.” When have you confronted this kind of feedback for an idea you proposed? How did you deal with it? Share your story in the comment section of this interview.

Do you agree that “many more people are compelled by a story than an aggregated statistic?” Explain your reasoning and share an example in the comment section of this article.