Surely one of the most overused words these days is “entrepreneur”. I have considered myself an entrepreneur for my entire working life, except for a couple of brief stints at “regular” jobs (Apple, Montgomery Securities). To my mind, being an entrepreneur involves taking a substantial personal risk to pursue creating something which matters to you. When I founded Prophet, I was doing precisely that. There was risk involved – – there were plenty of times I thought we’d go bankrupt – – but my passion for charting kept me going for all those years, through good times and bad.
With the hero worship of Jobs, Bezos, Ellison, Musk, and all the rest of them, the popular definition of “entrepreneur” has been something along these lines: “A person who doesn’t want to work at a salaried job but would rather work at a small company with the prospect of getting rich, yet taking little or no risk to either their salary or their assets.” Essentially, if you don’t want to be in the regular world of work, you fancy yourself an “entrepreneur”.
I was reminded of this by this poster I saw at San Francisco Airport:
This is deliberately designed to look like a movie poster, but it’s hawking an expensive college. (Their “one year MBA” costs six figures, believe it or not).
Now let me try to be clear about something: the comely lass above does not represent what an entrepreneur looks like (unless one considers a highly successful porn actress to be an “entrepreneur”). Let me show you a better example:
Young. Smart. Scruffy. Ambitious. Dedicated. Focused. Naive enough to think they can change the world. THAT is what I’m talking about.
If someone is telling you they are an entrepreneur, but they’re simply avoiding having a boss or a 9-to-5 gig, consider them suspect.
