Our founder, my grandfather B.C. Forbes, was both an entrepreneur and a prolific writer about entrepreneurs. The sixth of ten children of a Scottish tailor, he had long burned with ambition to become a business writer and, ultimately, his own boss, even though his formal education ended with the eighth grade.

B.C. first went to South Africa at age 24, where he worked for the editor of the new Rand Daily Mail, Edgar Wallace, who later achieved fame in Britain and the U.S. as a novelist. Many a time B.C. found himself writing editorials for his oft-inebriated boss. But itching to work on a larger canvas, B.C. immigrated to the U.S. in 1904.

America was not only a larger stage but also was a magnet for........

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