> One of the most exciting times of being an entrepreneur is the very early days after having the idea. You discovered a pain point, created an awesome solution, and now you have a whole world of potential ahead of you.
Having an idea and building a solution is innovation, not entrepreneurship. "Entrepreneurs" are business people who take what someone else built and compete with other business people to sell it to the greatest market at the highest margins, then flog the business itself to some sucker just before it tanks. Someone who imagines and builds needs to be quite profound, whereas someone who takes and sells needs to be quite petty, so rarely do you find innovation and "entrepreneurship" in the same individual.
So I would say innovators are bad at finding their competition, which is the "entrepreneurs". Innovators often get a shock at how vicious "entrepreneurs" turn out to be when the product's almost ready. Even before there's a solution built, many "entrepreneurs" roam around looking for innovator victims who happily advertise what they're doing or even posting their software samples online. "Business is war" to the entrepreneur. Anyone in business who's building and trusting instead of stealing and fighting won't last long.
Hm, disagree. Innovation is an essential element of entrepreneurship, just as persistence, boldness, business-acumen, if not the most essential one.
If you're not an innovator you also can't really be an "entrepreneur" since you won't be able to build new features for your product, nor scale your company.
What you're describing is more of an executive/corporate CEO that was hired into the company after a few years down the track I would say.
An example that comes to mind is Eric Schmidt. He's not an entrepreneur at all, he never invented something or created something new. However, he is a full-on CEO. He probably can scale up your company from $10,000 rev to $100M rev like no one else.
Imho entrepreneurs normally aren't good CEOs. They like to create new things, work on the product and usually don't want to bother talking with investors, hiring people or talking to the media.
Having an idea and building a solution is innovation, not entrepreneurship. "Entrepreneurs" are business people who take what someone else built and compete with other business people to sell it to the greatest market at the highest margins, then flog the business itself to some sucker just before it tanks. Someone who imagines and builds needs to be quite profound, whereas someone who takes and sells needs to be quite petty, so rarely do you find innovation and "entrepreneurship" in the same individual.
So I would say innovators are bad at finding their competition, which is the "entrepreneurs". Innovators often get a shock at how vicious "entrepreneurs" turn out to be when the product's almost ready. Even before there's a solution built, many "entrepreneurs" roam around looking for innovator victims who happily advertise what they're doing or even posting their software samples online. "Business is war" to the entrepreneur. Anyone in business who's building and trusting instead of stealing and fighting won't last long.