The Founder Fallacy: Occupational Choice, Congestion, and the Limits of Universal Entrepreneurship

An individual incentive to found a scalable firm need not remain feasible when appliedto an entire economy. We derive a labour-feasibility bound and study occupational entryin a finite heterogeneous model with differentiated demand, endogenous labour and capitalmarkets, entry and exit, risk preferences, autonomy, success beliefs, and survivorship-biasedvisibility. Strictly positive complementary non-founder labour per scalable founder rules out afounder share of one. Eurostat Business Demography and Structural Business Statistics supplyempirical moments and monetary normalizations; their mapping to structural quantitiesrequires explicit assumptions. Under a one-enterprise/one-founder labour mapping, theimplied feasibility ceiling is approximately 0.205–0.207 for EU27 and 0.299–0.305 for Portugal.A prospectively frozen four-axis sensitivity analysis certifies 29 of 162 trajectories afterthe registered solver-budget extension. All certified cells select six founders in the 24agent reference population, giving the model-conditional founder share 0.25. Neither theconditional Eurostat ceilings nor the certified share estimates the observed or socially optimalfounder share. The feasibility and profitability of scalable founding depend on occupationalcomposition, so an individual career choice cannot be extrapolated to everyone while holdingits conditions fixed. This manuscript is a preprint and has not undergone journal peer review.