A friend/mentor at the Tech Coast Angels sent me a one-sentence email today that simply said:
"Person who sees problem--human being; finds solution--visionary; solves problem--entrepreneur."
No commentary was provided and none was needed. The line comes from Naveen Jain and appeared in his article "How Entrepreneurs Become Visionary Leaders." The full quote is:
"An entrepreneur is not a person who starts a company but he is the person who
actually solves a problem. It’s all about execution and it is a state of mind. A
person who sees a problem is a Human Being, person who finds a solution is
visionary and the person who goes out and does something about it is an
entrepreneur."
My favorite part of this paragraph is that entrepreneurship is a state of mind. Starting a company is as easy as spending 30 minutes and $500 on Legalzoom.com. Anyone can do that and it doesn't make them an entrepreneur. Solving a real problem does. And that can happen whether you're the founder or one of 10,000 employees at your company.
Steve, it does look like you kinda look up to this Naveen Jain man. I read about him in the past. I would not call him a visionary. I would call him a lier and a dishonest person. Did you know that he started the company called InfoSpace. He was the founded. He liked to the public about the value of the shares of his company and how his company was doing back then. He said it was doing great, although it was not. He invested money into wireless Internet and the revenues were plunging. And this is what he wanted to go public. Many people lost their hard earnt money when they bought his company's shares. But in a few weeks or so he and the company's executives sold most of their shares and made millions, just on time before the value of their share went from 1 gran to 15 bucks or something. Pretty daunting, no? Check out this page: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/business/infospace/
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