Patrick Millsap on entrepreneurship: 'The how will come'

It would figure that anyone who enrolls in Patrick Millsap’s “American Business: Entrepreneurship and Innovation” course has a creative streak.


Instructor Profile: Patrick Millsap, American Business: Entrepreneurship and Innovation

How to bring out that creativity is Millsap’s task, one he welcomes.

“The idea of entrepreneurship is about creating something that’s not yet there,” said Millsap, a UC San Diego Extension instructor for nine years. “Every company wants these qualities in employees. The difference is, in one, you’re working for somebody else. The other, you start your own enterprise.”

Formerly a marketing and sales executive with two manufacturing firms, Nikken and Imaginetics, Millsap devotes full-time to teaching. He also instructs at UC Riverside and St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles.

“During my corporate career, I traveled more than 2.5 million miles around the world, doing sales and marketing seminars,” he said. “Now I prefer to stay closer to home.”

Charting the path to a new venture can be elusive, Millsap concedes.

“The first question students ask me is, how do I start my own company?” he said. “That’s the wrong question. The question should be, why? If you can figure out the why, the how will come.”

A history graduate of San Diego State University, Millsap also holds a master’s from Fuller Graduate School in Pasadena. He’s currently pursuing a doctorate in intercultural studies at Fuller.

His seminars took him to distant lands, where he needed an interpreter to convey his concepts.

“Once time in Japan, I told what I thought was a humorous story,” he recalled. “The interpreter told the students to laugh, which they did, without hearing the story. They were very polite, which I appreciated.”