Yale political scientist Douglas W. Rae continues his course Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform with a lecture on entrepreneurship as a driving force in business history. He works through case material on how individual founders and firms take risks, build organizations, and sometimes fail, connecting these examples back to the course's larger argument about capitalism's cycles of success and crisis. Rae lectures in a straightforward classroom format, drawing on historical business examples to illustrate how entrepreneurial activity fits into broader patterns of economic growth and instability. The session is part of an undergraduate lecture series examining capitalism as an economic and political system, with this installment focused specifically on the role entrepreneurs play within it. As with the rest of the course, the emphasis is on close reading of historical cases rather than abstract theory.