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Comment by aj7 | Hacker News Reader

I can simplify things. Entrepreneurship is about MAKING MONEY. Pure and simple. It’s not about ANYTHING else. It’s not about accuracy, elegance of design, creativity, new science, perfecting things, or any other boring nonsense. It’s about MAKING MONEY. As such, a certain innate greed enters the picture. The entrepreneur wishes to be rich, not right. So entrepreneurship is a personality, not a skill. Certainly you could teach useful things to budding entrepreneurs, but not entrepreneurship.

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Entrepreneurship is always about achieving a non-financial goal. "The best furniture in the world", "A PC on every desk", and so on.

Making money is just a speculative side effect of doing something right.

Worse, in that context, running after money pretty much is the best guarantee not to make any.

Just think of it. A customer will not hand over his money to you, just because you run so hard after it. He will give money because he also believes that your furniture is the best in the world.

The situation is obviously different for an established corporation. They are not about producing the best furniture in the world, but about maximally milking their existing cash cow in the furniture industry. So, yes, for them the bottom line is everything.

Still, corporations also die with their cash cow. Bottom-line milking only works for a while. It will work, until it doesn't anymore.

All businesses are about money. Everything else comes second. Making the best furniture or PC does not make it a successful business. You have to do it with within budget, you have to take care of sales/marketing, smooch the investors, motivate employees, risk you health/relationships. No body takes so much pain without a financial reward.

> All businesses are about money. Everything else comes second.

That does not explain why Facebook did not make money for the first nine years (2004-2012) of their existence. They were not worried about that. It also does not explain why Amazon still does not seek to make one dollar in profits. Amazon has not made profits for almost 20 years. Jef Bezos is simply not interested in that.

Both examples still utterly destroyed their merely profit-seeking competitors.

Successful entrepreneurs (Such as e.g. Steve Jobs) are evangelical. They staunchly believe in something. They also manage to convert staff and users to their belief by successfully evangelizing their views.

A mere money grubber will never succeed in doing that.

What is the mere money grubber going to tell the world? That he wants money and that the world should give him money? Seriously, what would be the message of a money grubber? Why would anybody believe him? They obviously won't.

I don't know if I agree with that last statement. Explain the behavior of war zone journalists or executives in humanitarian organizations. Yes, you need to be sure your needs are taken care of (money wise), but once you have that, there's a universe of possible non-monetary motivations that include stupendous amounts of pain (and many that don't that are just as worthwhile).

I don't believe this. It just depends on the motivation of the entrepreneur. I know entrepreneurs who created non-profit startups and work to improve public services, what do you say about this?

If your motivation is only money, I'm not sure you can go as far as when you have a true goal. Look at Elon musk, I'm sure he could have made money much more easily if he would have continued into banking services like PayPal.

I’m not so sure that something like entrepreneurship is pure and simple. There’s more to entrepreneurship than making money. It requires a balanced set of things, as does being an engineer or an artist.

But if you’re selling something, at least you’re creating something that’s (possibly) valuable such that people are willing to pay for.

In the end, you’re creating something. Whether it’s good or bad is generally subjective. But hopefully it’s worth it.

Saying "Entrepreneurship is only about MAKING MONEY" is like saying "Life is only about OXYGEN". While we certainly need oxygen in order to live, it is not the very point of our lives.

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