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So God Made an Entrepreneur

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And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said I need someone with a vision-

So God made an Entrepreneur…

God said I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, sketch ideas on a whiteboard, work all day in a coffee shop because she can’t afford to rent an office, work on the whiteboard some more, eat some bad pizza then go downtown and stay past midnight at a meetup of likeminded souls-

So God made an Entrepreneur…

God said I need somebody willing to work into the night for a year with a new company, and watch it die, then dry his eyes and say maybe next time. I need somebody who can solve a problem no one has ever solved before, make a whole company out of a laptop and a mobile phone; who can create market value out of an idea, a couple of friends and a lot of sleepless nights; who at launch time and funding season will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon and then, paining from keyboard back, will put in another 72 hours-

So God made an Entrepreneur…

God said I need somebody strong enough to throw away 6 months of work when customers don’t adopt a new feature, yet gentle enough to sit and listen to a new employee who wants to quit; who will stop his work early to volunteer at the community food bank. It had to be somebody who’d learn to code on new platforms and not cut corners; somebody to found, launch, iterate, pivot and fundraise and manage and lead and take out the trash and keep the team’s spirits high and replenish the self-esteem and a hard week’s work with a five-mile bike ride home. Somebody who would bring a team together with the tough, strong bonds of sacrifice; who would laugh and then sigh, and reply with smiling eyes when his son says he wants to spend his life doing what dad does-

So God made an Entrepreneur.

 

To the entrepreneur in all of us.

 

(This post was inspired by Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” and the 2013 Dodge Super Bowl Ad, I originally wrote it for the great folks at FounderSync, where you will find plenty of real entrepreneurs.)

 

Why More Experienced CEOs Will Stay At the Forefront of Tech Innovation

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This is as encouraging to me personally (“the average age of founders of technology companies is a surprisingly high 39 – with twice as many over-50 executives as those under 29 years old.)”, as it is generally (“The United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it.”).

But I especially like the described “four character traits of a successful CEO – Sensemaking, Relating, Visioning, Inventing.” I couldn’t agree more, and I have seen an abundance of these traits in the CEOs I admire the most (and a dearth in those who leaving me scratching my head).

Move Over Entrepreneurs, Here Come The Intrapreneurs – Forbes

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A section of DNA; the sequence of the plate-li...

An intrapreneur is someone who has an entrepreneurial streak in his or her DNA, but chooses to align his or her talents with a large organization in place of creating his or her own. To the classic entrepreneur this may be puzzling, but to what I think is a growing class of 21st Century “employees,” it may sound like the best of both worlds. I didn’t come up with the word “intrapreneur,” but several years ago when I struck up a conversation with an older gentleman at a train station and I described what I did for a living, he said something I’ll never forget: “Oh, you’re an intrapreneur–so was I.”

I prefer to call myself an “embedded entrepreneur”, but whatever…

You certainly don’t have to work at a start-up to be innovative and entrepreneurial!

Read the entire article:

Move Over Entrepreneurs, Here Come The Intrapreneurs – Forbes.

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