As the world has been melting down around us, I've been thinking about something that Mark Cuban talked about today in his blog.  Economic distress is going to make good ol' fashioned entrepreneurship popular again.

I remember my days in b-school 4+ years ago like they were yesterday.  A LOT of classmates were interested… make that obsessed with jobs in the financial industries.  Hedge funds, private equity, investment banking, real estate — all of them were very, very popular and highly competitive.  But if you look those things today… a lot of them involve the financial engineering that Mark Cuban alludes to in his blog post.

As people analyze what happened with the financial crisis, they'll point to derivatives, leverage, and financial engineering as a root cause.  We'll get some government regulation in these areas… some good, some overreaching… but the net of it is that a lot of "opportunity" tied to these will go away.  And that's probably a good thing.

Things are changing around us.  The pendulum went too far in the direction of financial engineering and away from entrepreneurship.  After the chips fall, I expect a resurgence in entrepreneurship brought about by more supportive government policy along with the steady rise of unemployment that will get people back into the garage.

The cycle is refreshing, and it is 1991.  The next golden era of entrepreneurship lurks right around the corner.