Inc. magazine has an answer to the question What’s an Entrepreneur? The Best Answer Ever was conceived 37 years ago by HBS professor Howard Stevenson:
Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.
Of course, one can pursue opportunity in different ways. Everyone who gets up and goes to work is pursuing opportunity. While attending a pitch session for startups this week, it occurred to me that a pitch for a business has the same elements of a job interview – we all at some point need to sell ourselves or show something of value in what we’ve done or plan to do.
However, the difference is the level of uncertainty and control. Entrepreneurs don’t have a path laid forward where they can just ‘show up for work’ do work defined for them and get paid.
Many become entrepreneurs to ‘control’ their fate, but in fact the key challenge is dealing with so much outside one’s control, and the very uncertainty of that environment, customers, etc. What makes a job a ‘steady job’ is predictability and the way companies create a situation for productive work: Defined business model, defined roles, defined value. All this equals ‘steady income’ in a ‘steady job’.
In a startup, none of things are defined in certain terms as the business model itself is being constructed. Eric Reis defined a startup as “A human institution designed to deliver a product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” For those entrepreneurs who already created and have a working business model, they’ve managed to squeeze out the uncertainty of startups, but still are captains of a ship that needs steering.
As the Inc. article points out and has been noted elsewhere, entrepreneurs, contrary to myth, are not necessarily risk-seekers. They have enough risk thank you. What they are instead are opportunity optimizers. If I gamble, I want to play the ‘house’ and put the odds in my favor, while doing everything to minimize downside and maximize upside.
The entrepreneurial difference is pursuing opportunity by disregarding artificial limits, turning closed doors into open doors, seeing opportunity others can’t see, taking necessary risks to establish a business, and overcoming what to others might be insurmountable obstacles. As in many other ‘learn by doing’ endeavors, I’ll learn best what an entrepreneur is by simply being one.