What is an entrepreneur?
The word entrepreneur comes from the French word „entreprendre‟, which means „to do something, and in the Middle era it was originally used in the sense of a „person‟ who is active, who gets things done.
Entrepreneurs are people who have a vision of a better future and have a desire to realize it. They have a great sense of believing in their own ability and they have a great pride in their work.
So what does an entrepreneur look like? An entrepreneur is a person who undertakes a risk for gaining profit in a business venture.
Usually the entrepreneur assumes the risk of failure, but entrepreneurs must also be willing to experiment different strategies in the pursuit of profitable outcomes because it is the entrepreneur’s energy, creativity and motivation that triggers the production of a superior product & services.
Today’s economy is increasingly dominated by an army of entrepreneurs, who create opportunities where there were none before. Entrepreneurs appear more frequently across many different domains and display more diversity than ever before.
Entrepreneurship is a state of mind and a way of life even before it is a job title. It is a great passion. Entrepreneurship is an ability to look for success in every challenge, and to develop it from every setback. Entrepreneurship describes a way of thinking and acting, it is not just about making money or creating jobs. It is about positive contribution to the unique world we live in.
To be an entrepreneur means to be an expert in your own life. Some of the skills needed are persuasion, efficiency orientation, systematic planning, problem solving, self-confidence, assertiveness. Entrepreneurship is not just about startups and high risk. It's also about how we look at our everyday life and how we improve all the things we do every day. Positive contribution to the unique world we live in is what entrepreneurship really means.
What does startup mean?
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. It's not necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
Startups scale up faster than established companies. (Growth is the one thing startups do better than established companies.) Because they grow fast, startups can afford to take risks that established companies cannot. Because they grow fast, startups can attract better talent. Because they grow fast, startups can be sold for more money. Because they grow fast, startups can change the world.
A startup has to make something it can deliver to a large market
Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them.
That is why entrepreneurship tends to run in families. The founders are not just smart but have a way of thinking about things which other people just don't have.
A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. It's not necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.
In fact , startups do have a different sort of DNA from other businesses. Google is not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working. Google was different from the beginning.
A startup has to make something it can deliver to a large market
Usually successful startups happen because the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to them.
Google has similar origins. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. But unlike most people they had the technical expertise both to notice that existing search engines were not as good as they could be, and to know how to improve them. Over the next few years their problem became everyone's problem, as the web grew to a size where you didn't have to be a picky search expert to notice the old algorithms weren't good enough. But as happened with Apple, by the time everyone else realized how important search was, Google was entrenched.
The other connection between startups and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things are, in the broader sense of the word, new technology. When a startup both begins with an idea exposed by technological change and makes a product consisting of technology in the narrower sense (what used to be called "high technology"), it's easy to conflate the two.