Panera founder says the idea of ‘swashbuckling’ entrepreneurs finding success from taking big risks is ‘a myth’

• Panera founder Ron Shaich says that successful entrepreneurs are opportunists, not risk-takers.
• In his new book, Shaich says the “swashbuckling entrepreneur of popular imagination” is a myth.
• A good entrepreneur is someone who’s able to see opportunities others don’t, Shaich says.

Although a German study once found that millionaires are more likely to take risks, founder and former Panera CEO Ron Shaich disagrees that leaning into risk is a winning strategy — he argues that successful entrepreneurs and creators are actually risk-averse.

“The swashbuckling entrepreneur of popular imagination is just a myth and rarely succeeds,” Shaich writes in his new book, “Know What Matters: Lessons from a Lifetime of Transformations.”

Shaich co-founded Au Bon Pain in 1981, of which Panera Bread was later just a division. In 1998, he sold off most of the business (including Au Bon Pain) except for Panera to make the brand the company’s focus.

“I could see the power of Panera to be a nationally dominant brand which is why I sold every other company,” Shaich told Insider in an interview. “You might say that was risky — but no, it was to protect the golden gem.”

In his book, Shaich writes that when he started his first business in 1980, not long after getting his MBA from Harvard, he asked his father for an advance on his inheritance. His inheritance was $250,000 in total — that’s just under $900,000 in 2023 dollars when accounting for inflation.

He asked for it in three payments, however, not wanting to “blow all the money” on his first idea in case the business failed.

Using $25,000 of his own money and $75,000 from his inheritance advance, Shaich then went on to start a cookie shop called the Cookie Jar, which later merged with a then-struggling bakery called Au Bon Pain.

Shaich uses this anecdote to point toward what he calls a “misunderstood fact about successful entrepreneurs and creators.”

“We’re not risk-takers,” he writes. “In fact, we’re risk-averse.”

But this point needs contextualization, Shaich says — good entrepreneurs don’t seek out risk, he says, but rather see opportunities that are so great that the biggest risk would be not to take them.

“Successful entrepreneurs and creators seeing can feel this opportunity that nobody else can,” Shaich says. “And there’s this sense that we got it. The challenge at that point is really simple — it’s protecting that at all costs. So that’s not taking a risk. It’s actually avoiding risk of messing up that opportunity. For some people that may feel like a risk, but it’s not a risk at all. It’s the exact opposite.”