But here in Japan, Tokyo Metallic's tiny band of entrepreneurs is facing many obstacles, not the least of which is the giant Japanese telephone company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, which currently has a competing strategy for wiring Japan with high-speed fiber optic cables.
A tiny minority of entrepreneurs ever get rich.
My father's mother, a very tiny but feisty entrepreneur, is a Double D and only 5'1.
For decades, the microfinance industry has really been about microcredit -- making tiny loans to shoestring entrepreneurs in poor countries.
Although the number of professionally run not-for-profit businesses is growing, the vast majority of social entrepreneurs run tiny operations that cannot scale into anything bigger.
NEW DELHI — Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered tiny loans for village entrepreneurs as a way to fight poverty, has been forced out of the bank he founded, the government-appointed chairman of the bank said Wednesday.
This is not the fabled billion-buyer market; much of the purchasing has been in the countryside, where small-time entrepreneurs buy tiny, tinny vehicles that sell for $3,000 to $5,000 each.
That said, entrepreneurs were a tiny minority in the river of public servants and employees of state-owned companies that flowed, waving placards calling for "prosperous and sustainable socialism" to the plaza, where President Raúl Castro stood beneath a huge statue of José Martí, the revolutionary and poet.
Literally meaning "village bank", the institution offers tiny loans to would-be entrepreneurs who would otherwise be refused conventional loans, and his microcredit scheme has been replicated across the world, and has been hailed as being the most effective way of defeating poverty.
