

Entrepreneurship is not about changing the world - urlwolf
http://smartbabesaresexy.blogspot.com/2009/01/enough-about-passion-and-changing-world.html

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daleharvey
Passion isnt part of the definition of entrepreneur, but I do think its a
facet that precedes it.

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

~~~
pg
Exactly. People will work harder to do something that improves the world as
well as making money. If we were just trying to make money, we probably
wouldn't have started YC, for example. We _hope_ to make money, but that alone
wouldn't have provided sufficient activation energy.

~~~
paul7986
This post irks me!

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!

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cubedice
Edison certainly had passion and interest, but he also had a giant ego. He cut
down Tesla, knowing full well that AC was a better option. Maybe he wasn't
just thinking about the money (he did stand to lose his patent royalties), but
certainly his legacy came before "changing the world."
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents>
[http://media.www.thetriangle.org/media/storage/paper689/news...](http://media.www.thetriangle.org/media/storage/paper689/news/2004/10/15/SciTech/Edison.Tesla.Competed.For.Acdc.Current.Monopoly-754734.shtml)

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Smartbabes
Hello everyone!

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>

~~~
alranissteve
How true.

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.

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dtap
This strikes me as very close minded. The measure of success depends on the
metric. How innovative I am does not always manifest itself in money. Does
that make my endeavor any less entrepreneurial? I think not.

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.

~~~
newt0311
Classically, the definition of entrepreneurs has been the former. People who
set out to make companies and get rich. Just try google: define:entrepreneur.

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...

~~~
daleharvey
founder?

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tigerthink
_Cross-posted from the blog's comments..._

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.

~~~
hollerith
The parent of this comment calls Reddit a time-wasters and contrasts it with
online education.

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_.)

~~~
nostrademons
Honestly, I don't think Eliezer Yudkowsky's writings at all compare with what
you can get by seriously working through the MIT OpenCourseware site and/or
buying textbooks off Amazon.com and working through all the problems in them.
Don't confuse feeling smart with being smart.

~~~
Eliezer
I freely admit, and sometimes explicitly warn, that I can't compete with doing
the problems in textbooks.

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.

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10ren
entrepreneur: _n_ one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a
business or enterprise. <http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/entrepreneur>

"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.

~~~
10ren
Even for the pure capitalist, there are well documented benefits to having a
non-momentary cause or purpose [1]. Your workers work better; your community
supports you; your customers favour you. It's good PR, and every _lasting
company that makes lots of money_ does PR.

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_

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msie
Some examples of entrepreneurs who are truly amazing and long-lasting:

\- patent trolls

\- domain squatters

\- spammers

~~~
savantids
I don't think the blogger is referring to unethical business practices any
more than the blogger would endorse organised crime and steroids in sports. He
is referring to people like Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin and Bill Gates .. not
Bernie Madoff or Jeff Skilling.

~~~
edw519
Uh, "Bill Gates" = "unethical business practices".

Where have you been?

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nostrademons
I think it's better to phrase this in terms of instrumental vs. inherent
goals. The _inherent_ goal of an entrepreneur is to build lasting companies
that generate large profits. That's what they're there for, and that's the
yardstick for success.

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.

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ph0rque
> An entrepreneur's job is to build lasting companies that make lots of money.
> Period.

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"?

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ctingom
Entrepreneurship is about changing one little small part of my world.

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msie
"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."

"truly amazing" - a little bit of hyperbole perhaps? Oh boy, I can't wait for
the Golden Era of Entrepreneurship to arrive!!!

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bjelkeman-again
Old fashioned thinking. Only money counts. I disagree.

~~~
alain94040
To me, entrepreneur meant trying something new. By the way, it's a French
word, so I should be qualified to comment on its meaning beyond what your
thesaurus says :-)

So I agree with your disagreement.

~~~
savantids
The french origins come from the words for undertake and business
(entreprise). Yes, so it means to star a business.

~~~
hailxenu
Disclaimer: engineering undergrad here, half-learnt book knowledge lies ahead.

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.

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theBobMcCormick
What a stupid and pointless blog post. His argument is completely unfounded.
For example; in the comments, someone asks where Jimbo Wales would be
considered an entrepreneur and the author of the blog says that Jimbo Wales is
_not_ an entrepreneur, because WikiPedia is not a for profit business.

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).

~~~
123nohack
Jimbo has tried many times to start businesses to make money, and he has
failed in all of them.

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?

~~~
theBobMcCormick
Look up the definition of an enterprise in your dictionary. A non-profit like
Wikipedia _is_ an enterprise. Therefore, Jimbo is a successful entrepreneur.

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iamelgringo
It's a lot easier to hire passionate engineers as employees if you're trying
to change the world, however.

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sarvesh
How can one create a long lasting company if that person isn't passionate
about what he is creating? How long one work on something he doesn't love? I
think his statements are contradicting or at least nearly impossible to
achieve.

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c00p3r
this sporty hot-shot, who jumps on the roof every day / he knows how it works
/ but entirely missed the point. =)

