You’re Not an Entrepreneur | Hacker News Reader

You’re Not an Entrepreneur

blog.jolieodell.com

41 points_b8r034 comments

The same thing goes for saying "I have a startup." I wish I could write as clearly and persuasively as Jolie O'Dell, but I can't, so let me just say ...

All due respect to those of you putting in time, effort and sweat into your project, but being a project does not, of itself, make it a startup. I'm not going to provide a checklist as O'Dell does, but a project, although worthy of respect, is not necessarily a startup.

ADDED IN EDIT:

I should also have said this: I don't care. The labels people use are largely irrelevant, including the labels you give yourself. What matters is your drive and intent to make something, and in doing so, to make the world a better place. I don't care if you are, or are not, an "entrepreneur" by whatever system of labelling someone uses. I also don't care if what's taking your time is a project, hobby, startup or complete time-sink.

What I do care about is that people who can should be encouraged to use their limited time to build something that matters: to them, to others, possibly to the world in general.

If I had 17 accounts they would all be giving you karma.

<fx: blush> Gosh. Thank you.

Agreed on your second point - I don't care. Who cares if I am or am not an entrepreneur, or a startup, as long as I'm building something cool, having fun and maybe making some money. After all, isn't that how most entrepreneurs and startups got started? At some point, my project may or may not become a startup, and people may or may not start calling an entrepreneur. Why waste time trying to pinpoint when that happens?

Facebook wouldn't be called a startup or Mark Zuckerburg an entrepreneur in the early days, no real funding, all at college, no business model.

It has rarely been my experience that energy invested into defending the purity of definitions has ROI as good as energy invested into customer acquisition (for either party).

You could say the same about writing in online fora commenting on such energy investments ;)

And yet, here we are.

I think that people that care about definitions are free to do as they please and don't need to see everything and anything in terms of ROI or customers acquired.

If that were the case HN would be terribly quiet. (But maybe the SNR would get better!).

Honestly, who cares! I'm a "projecteneur" looking to incorporate my "project" in what people may call a "startup" to get rid of my day job and make money with what you can call a "business plan" (that I have not written down... and probably won't ever). I have the guts to not ask for VC/Angels money for an "idea", that, IMHO is ridiculous. And I don't plan of having an office ever because I hate offices and I think everyone should too!

Can we make the word official? "projecteneur" or "bootstraper" :-)

Does it really matter?

I know a guy who brings in tens of thousands of dollars with his web business. He's not an entrepreneur by your definition. I think he's fine with it.

Reminds of the lyrics by Big Punisher, "I'm not a player I just f a lot"

The OP implicitly differentiates a small business owner from an entrepreneur. Your friend is a small business owner. When he raises money to hire employees, buy advertising, and expand his product line, and his daily responsibilities shift from actually making the product to financial planning and risk management, he has become an entrepreneur.

Most hackers probably want to be small business owners. An entrepreneur engages in "real" work only tangentially. They will use domain knowledge to plan effectively, but someone else will be making it happen.

I find Jolie's black and white outlook on the word disheartening and a window into the way she views the world. Moreover, this stuff is two months old, why are we relinking it to HN?

Plus, if you aren't an entrepreneur yourself, where are the qualifications to label others? I just am not on board with this article

What label to slap on my forehead certainly is the least of my problems.

Absolutely! Reminds me of The Social Network when Shawn Fanning tells that girl he's an entrepreneur and she replies, "So you're unemployed."

Semantics, but I think she's right. You're not an entrepreneur until you've done something. A good reminder, very The War of Art-esque (a book I highly recommend).

Nitpicking: Sean Parker. Fanning was the other Napster guy.

My bio used to read: Entrepreneur (aka. Unemployed)

Isn't this all part of the hustle that it takes to be an entrepreneur?

- You call youself an entrepreneur because you aim to be one

- You call your one person a company a startup because you want it to be one with employees

- You call your startup a business even though it makes no money and has no business model

Most people I meet doing 'projects' exaggerate how far ahead they are numbers, traction, staff (i.e. count freelancers as staff) in order that people want to work with them.

People don't say come work with us - we reached a peak of 10 new users last week after a year of work, we don't have a clue what we are doing and have no money or contacts.

Wishing it to be so doesn't make it so.

I'm all for humoring people when they fortify their dreams but it's a fine line between ambition and delusion.

You can only really tell in retrospect if they were deluded or not based on weather they succeeded or not.

On a related note: 'side project' != 'start-up'. Though it may become one.

True, mostly what I see at a lot of networking things are entremanures... thats why I stopped going, as a developer none of them seemed to have any actual work for me.

> entremanures

That's a gem :)

entremanures? was that on purpose?

I didn't make it up, can't remember where I stole it from - but I definitely can't take the credit :)

So, what do you actually do about that

I stopped going to pure networking events and just go events that teach me how to do something, I meet more people interested in projects that way and get more out of it.

I never have a startup or call myself an entrepreneur, but this post makes me despise these 2 words. Whatever they want to call people who tinker with projects, work a lot, and take risks (hackers?), I want to be in that club. If the money comes that's great. I don't want to act all serious and write business plans, get an office, raise VC money in order to become an entrepreneur. If these constitute an entrepreneur, I'm fine with not being one.

I ask these questions three:

1) What good or service do you provide?

2) Who buys it?

3) What impact does it have on society? (entrepreneurs have real impact on society, from cleaning carpets to creating computers)

The word is ill-defined...it basically boils down to "one who assumes risk for starting a new venture". Not much more to it than that. My view is that TONS of people are entrepreneurs even if I don't care to read about them. They're still people taking risk to try and start something up, and I'll give most anybody props for that...especially if they're planning and working hard, but that's not an absolute requirement.

Whatever be the thought creeping into my mind after reading this post, it is indeed a REALITY CHECK

I want to ignore rest of the post and just read this - "I’ve worked for entrepreneurs quite a bit over the past 12 years. They’re hustlers, jugglers, madmen, egomaniacs, people who desperately attempt to build empires on little money and less time"

TL;DR: http://blog.mattlanger.com/post/1516687187

She's got a good point; I'd take the same stance on the word "startup". I see a lot of statements here like "take a look at my startup!" with a link to a little webapp that's brand new and either has no revenue model or no customers.

I wonder if Jolie is going too far in creating a strict definition -- many side projects have made people into true entrepreneurs. Is Patio11 an entrepreneur? Absolutely. And he was when he was selling Bingo Card Creator while still working as a Japanese salaryman.

Many entrepreneurs do indeed "go through hell" to succeed. But correlation != causation; you don't have to go through hell, angel rounds, funding rounds, or huge public launches to qualify as an entrepreneur. Peldi is an entrepreneur -- one hell of an entrepreneur if you ask me.

There certainly is a limit to the legitimate use of this word, I agree. The bar is probably a bit lower than Jolie suggests, though.

re: patio11 - while he met one of her negative criteria (working for someone else) - he met the other positive ones - had a product he was selling. I'd suggest that meeting the positive criteria can generally outweigh some of the negative ones. The difference would be working for someone else, coming home, spending a lot of evenings on a web-app, and saying you're an entrepreneur. In the web-app space, I wouldn't consider someone an entrepreneur who had no working web-app, or had one with no paying customers and/or revenue stream.

You must raise outside capital to be considered an entrepreneur, bootstrapping be damned?

We employ a couple dozen people and never took a VC round. Looks like I've been living a lie. :(

At the very least, she could have suggested an alternate term for people who don't meet every point on her arbitrary checklist.

It sounds like that's what she's saying at first, but then

> Someone (customers or VCs/angels) gave you money for your idea (or you’re actively trying to get money from customers/angles/VCs).

A bootstrapped business would fulfill the or clause.

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