Current theories of the firm fail to distinguish between firm and entrepreneur and provide no explanation for entrepreneurial success except in terms of firm success. Even in current theories of the entrepreneur (psychological and otherwise) he or she is entirely cast as a bundle of traits or behaviors or heuristics and biases that serve to explain firm performance. In this paper, I suggest we put the entrepreneur center stage and adopt an instrumental view of the firm. I draw heavily upon theories of symbolic cognition from the Sciences of the Artificial and explore more recent work on semantic cognition to illustrate how we can go beyond theories of the firm to theories of firm design.