Entrepreneurship is not about changing the world
smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com
smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com
just like becoming a professional swimmer, being the best (swimmer) and not failing (starting a company) both require extremely hard work, and its hard to sustain that level of work required without some(a lot of) passion
What does the author consider Thomas Edison's work? Did Edison innovate early for the sole purpose of making money? I think rather he did because of passion, interest and possibly the thought of changing the world. Obviously he succeeded in the above and in turn created industries that fed and feeds millions of people each year.
I can't imagine starting up a business where I had no passion and interest in doing, rather only for the money. Ummm i had that type of situation before and it was called a job!
But the point of the article is that founders of boo.com, webvan.com, kosmo.com etc. and all the other stupid 90's dotcom ideas all failed as entrepreneurs because their business sucked ... not because they lacked passion.
Passion + stupid business = passionately stupid business ailure.
It's not that I wouldn't love to change the world - I just don't find that a realistic goal to set. My immediate goal is much lower and more egoistic: I need to create something that rakes in enough money to sustain itself and cover my basic living expenses.
Only then will I have the time and mental freedom to pursue one of my world-changing ideas.
The problem with the world-changing ideas is that most of them are so inherently binary. Who can really afford to dedicate themselves at least 6-12 months to an all-or-nothing experiment?
For me the most important attribute of a business model is not the revolution-potential but rather the scalability. I'm going for things that have a chance to pay my bills even when they're only a small success. Call me a coward but I need a leg to stand on before I'll dare to reach for the stars, so to say...
If all you care about it money, than obviously not having it will mean you have failed. If you define your entrepreneurial spirit as something more, you are successful when you achieve that something, whatever it may be.
Now, if you're an entrepreneur and a visionary who changes the world, you get double karma.
When we use a language, we should respect its definitions or pretty soon people start saying something and meaning something entirely else. Maybe instead of entrepreneur, we need another word like doer...
OK, let's say I want to change the world and I decide starting a company is the best way to do that. I guess that means I'm not an entrepreneur, huh?
"But the sooner an entrepreneur and young budding CEOs realise that there really is only one metric that counts in this game, the sooner we will get beyond the recent Web 2.0 silliness and thereby give birth to a revitalised start up environment where some truly amazing, long lasting companies will be created."
To the contrary, the Web 2.0 silliness is a result of people thinking like you. Most Web 2.0 companies (reddit, twitter, youtube) are time-wasters. If entrepreneurs were looking to change the world, they'd be working on something real like online education.
When someone says It’s a crime to cut up people, it certainly doesn’t mean he holds the surgeons culpable.
Entrepreneur, in it’s most generally understood meaning, is about starting a business that actually makes money. The definition is specially relevant in the world of technology because it’s abound with businesses that created ‘cool’ products (because they were passionate about it) but failed to monetize it.
Now does that make 'social entrepreneur' a misnomer? Certainly not.
Probably the most valuable online education available today for a sufficiently smart person wanting to become a scientific generalist is provided by Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Since 2001 I for example have learned more science from Eliezer's online writings than from all other sources combined.) The software for Eliezer's latest project, Less Wrong, is . . . Reddit.
(Clarification on what I mean by "education": Eliezer provides education, not credentialing.)
But I'll compete with anything short of that; and there are some things today's textbooks don't seem to mention, maybe because it's not formal-sounding enough or universally agreed-upon enough. You can read through a whole physics textbook without understanding MWI; reading about heuristics and biases will leave out a lot that would be helpful in applying it to your everyday life (important exceptions: Robyn Dawes, Cialdini)... but reading standard evolutionary psychology actually will get you all the extras, oddly enough.
Perhaps she has a point -- Twitter and Youtube are not making money. By her definition, they fail as entrepreneurs. I don't know about Reddit.
"Enterprise" makes it pretty broad, from Broadway musicals to journeys of discovery. There's nothing about "lasting companies" that make "lots" of money.
The article is really suggesting that entrepreneur should be defined as it has defined it. Unfortunately, it presents no arguments for this, but merely proclaims an opinion.
But apart from the ideal capitalist (who doesn't exist, sorry), the human species has an instinct for cooperation and for belonging (not always requited). It's not intellectual or calculated, it's just part and parcel of the animal that is homo sapiens, as much as being bipedal. It's why sacrifice is at the centre of popular films (e.g. Titanic), and why members choose to hang out with each other, and to devote themselves to something. I surmise that the reason why humans evolved this instinct is because cooperation and unity are very effective at promoting survival and growth - which today is largely handled through a business or enterprise.
[1] for example, see Built to Last and Good to Great
Some instrumental goals of this are being passionate about the product, changing the world, doing what you love, etc. Because if you do what you love, you're likely passionate about the product. If you're passionate about the product, you'll likely change the world. If you change the world, you'll likely (though not always) have a built a lasting company that generates large profits.
Similarly, for most people, generating large profits is an instrumental goal to being happy, and then being happy is the inherent goal. Some people find they can be happy by doing a not-so-profitable small business that happens to let them do what they want, skipping the make-lots-of-profits step. These people fail at entrepreneurship but win at life.
- patent trolls
- domain squatters
- spammers
Where have you been?
This is one of those arguments that starts falling apart as soon as you start looking at it closely. What if I build a company that makes lots of money for a short period of time? Am I not an entrepreneur? Or what if I don't respect laws and ethics while making said money, and I'm smart enough to not get caught, or smart enough to quit when I have a reasonable value of "lots of money"?
"truly amazing" - a little bit of hyperbole perhaps? Oh boy, I can't wait for the Golden Era of Entrepreneurship to arrive!!!
So I agree with your disagreement.
All of this discussion boils down to how you define the word 'enterprise'. A definition I was taught, of the concept of 'empresa' (meaning, literally in Spanish, 'enterprise'), is
socio-economical unit in which capital, work and direction are coordinated to achieve production that responds to the requirements of the human medium in which it acts,
which is indeed a broad definition, and one that accepts Microsoft, Apple, the Wikimedia Foundation and your local soup kitchen as enterprises, even if not all are for-profit organizations.
Now, sustainability is desirable trait all such organizations, but it is not required, obviously ;)
You say that making a definition as general as that to be useless, but I disagree. When someone tells you that he is an entrepreneur, and nothing else, all you know is that he runs an organization that does _something_ for _someone_. You don't know anything about his profits, whether he seeks them or not, and that is something that, for an outsider, doesn't matter. The definition of 'entrepreneur', profit seeking or not, does not help you to know about the finances of the organization, and thus the generality isn't harmful to it.
This a rather arbitrary definition of an entrepreneur. I checked both Dictionary.com and Merriam-Webster.com, and both of their definitions for entrepreneur do include room for entrepreneur who found non-profits. See for yourself: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/entrepreneur http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/entrepreneur
Clearly the authors argument and conclusion is unfounded crap. Creating a long lasting and profitable commercial business is certainly a valid motivation for entrepreneurship, but so is changing the world, or even something as modest as looking to establish a second income stream, or looking for a different time/income tradeoff (4HWW, etc).
It is one thing to start a nonprofit foundation and have people donated their time to building it.
It is a completely different thing to own a P&L, have to pay suppliers, pay employees, get customers, pay taxes, and still make money.
Jimbo is many things, but he is NOT a successful entrepreneur. Wikia anyone?
Thanks so much for your comments both here and on the original blog. I will try to reply to a few points raised here which I think misunderstand my argument.
1. "This thinking caused the economic crisis" ... I am having a hard time following the logic here. Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs ... how did they cause this economic crisis again? I believe the poster is conflating my argument with a view I never made, which is that people should focus on short term versus long term. I never stated this, and no one would claim that a person who only tries to maximize the profits for one day to the detriment of the company for ever would be a successful entrepreneur.
2. As for the bankers in this world, according to my view, they would be complete failures ... as they LOST money by the bucket loads.
3. As for the question of starting a company to change the world, I applaud you. You may be very successful in helping many people. But this would not put you in the same league as Bill Gates, Sergey Brin or Steve Jobs UNLESS your company can consistently make money.
To make my point perhaps a bit clearer, take for example another profession ... brain surgeon. You can be the nicest brain surgeon in the world. You can set up a company that offers free books to children. But if my father needs brain surgery, all of these are side considerations. What matters is whether you can perform the brain surgery successfully or not. That is it.
The same point applies to competitive athletes. They can be fine people, but if they come in 8th in a footrace, they have not succeeded in their job, which is to run faster than their competitors.
4. As for the point about twitter and other non-moneymaking companies, that is exactly my point ... they need to find viable business models. Linkedin is a company that makes money and one I consider to be an entrepreneurial success ... twitter, no (at least not yet).
5. As for Vincent Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, they are all successful scientists. They are NOT successful entrepreneurs, unless you stretch the definition of entrepreneur to a point where the term becomes meaningless. (e.g. "My mom is an entrepreneur because she gave me the wonderful gift of life," etc.)
If you change the definition of a word, you can prove any nonsense. For example I can prove that camels have wings and can fly ... just by stretching the definition of camel to also include all animals with two eyes. This is a logical fallacy.
So in sum, you can respect people like Jimmy Wales or Tim Berners Lee or Linus Torvalds or my mother. I certainly do. But they have not won the entrepreneur game. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin ... Yes. My mom ... no.
Love,
Anjali Sen http://smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com
I am in music school studying viola, and these comments really hit home.
Not everyone can be successful, not everyone can be above average, and these attempts to stretch the definition seem to me to be a way of just making people feel better when they are not successful.
If being an entrepreneur is all about passion, GREAT, I can be a successfull entreprenuer, and so can everyone else! Wow!
But this is nonsense. In any human endeavor, not everyone can win. Not everyone can be Yo Yo Ma, even though it may make you feel good and touchy feely to say that you can.