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Extant literature on entrepreneurial cognition declares that entrepreneurs who are confident in their ability to design a new business perform better than entrepreneurs who lack such a self-perception of efficacy. This is swagger. A different set of literature, including Discovery-Driven Planning, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup Method, recommends that entrepreneurs create, confirm, or reject hypotheses to design and refine the specific elements of their business model. This is the scientific method.

This article used survey data from 353 participants in an international business pitch competition to connect these two literatures. We found that the number of hypotheses that the entrepreneur elucidated and confirmed were linked to business model performance. Counter-intuitively, the number of hypotheses rejected by the entrepreneur showed the strongest relationship to success. We found no significant relationship between the number of interviews that an entrepreneur conducted and the business model’s performance: more effort was not always helpful.

Although we found no direct connection between an entrepreneur’s self-efficacy in searching for a new idea and the business model’s eventual success, entrepreneurs with high levels of this narrow form of self-­confidence were more likely to perform the constructive actions of elucidating, confirming, and rejecting hypotheses. In summary, swagger leads to science, and science leads to success.

The author describes how he entered the marketing field and describes his contributions in four sections: articles written, books published, students nurtured, and executives consulted and trained. He describes his contributions to the marketing field in nine areas: marketing theory and orientations, improving the role and practice of marketing, analytical marketing, the social and ethical side of marketing, globalization and international marketing competition, marketing in the new economy, creating and managing the product mix, strategic marketing, and broadening the concept and application of marketing.

Entrepreneurs and their ventures are often portrayed as unambiguously positive forces in society. Specifically, high technology and equity-funded startups are heralded for their innovative products and services that are believed to alter the economic, social, and even political fabric of life in advantageous ways. This paper draws on established theory on the causes of misconduct in and by organizations to elaborate the factors that can give rise to misconduct in entrepreneurial ventures, illustrating our arguments with case material on both widely known and less well-known instances of entrepreneurial misconduct. In venturing into the dark side of entrepreneurship, we hope to contribute to theory on entrepreneurship and organizational misconduct, augment entrepreneurship pedagogy, and offer ideas and examples that can enhance entrepreneurs’ awareness of their susceptibility to wrongdoing.