Part II Becoming an Entrepreneur – The Entrepreneurs Mantra – Top 10 Things You Need

popart 2016 smDon’t you just love all these top 10 lists? Do they even make sense?

Most of the lists I’ve seen all list some variation of: have a great team, find a great co-founder(s), build your MVP, pivot or don’t pivot, get to product market fit, have a revenue model, raise some money, etc…

Becoming an entrepreneur isn’t about any of those things.

It wasn’t until my third company that I really became an entrepreneur. How can that be you say? The fist I started while I still had a regular job and therefore had the cushion of a salary, the second I was a co-founder and we had a modest amount raised and I was drawing a salary, the third I received a small grant and covered my bills for six months. It’s what happened after those six months that made the difference.

I’ll never forget the day I realized the change. I was having lunch and a friend joined me (he’d had a company he’d been working on and had recently closed it). We got to talking and he looked at me and said “You know, you’ve become an entrepreneur.” I looked at him with a puzzled look and responded “What do you mean?”. ”Well…”, he said, “… you haven’t stopped talking about what you’re doing with your business. You’ve run out of money; but, you don’t seem to care. You’re knocking on all the doors you can. You’re doing whatever it takes to keep it going.” And, he was right. I was.

And, it struck me that being an entrepreneur isn’t about having the word ‘Founder” on your business card. It’s about being so passionate up about what you’re doing that you just keep going. You find a way forward. You find the money. You find that co-founder you’ve been looking for. You find those great developers you need. You just f’ing do it! And, you do it every day. There is no boss to tell you to get up and go to work. You are the boss. You get up because it’s what you do.

It’s your mantra: “I do therefore I am”. It’s the mantra of the entrepreneur.

What do you do?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Comments are closed.