About the Author: John J. Walters is an associate at Wasabi Ventures and CEO of MeetingCaptain.
Today I asked a long-time friend and employee of Steve Jobs’ fruit-themed empire to tell me what “entrepreneurship” meant to him. He gave me two responses: one he saw as the “textbook” definition and one he thought up himself.
Speaking for the textbook, he said entrepreneurship was simply the start-up of a business. Speaking for himself, he said that it was realizing a dream. He admitted that this may be because he was born and raised in the US of A, where we have a special appreciation — even reverence — for those who create something from scratch that gets bred into each successive generation of Americans. Then he went on to talk about how part of the appeal of working for a company such as Apple was that their first creation was a computer made out of wood with the logo carved into the back, which they constructed in a garage. They have since created something great from something small.
Personally, I always had ascribed a certain amount of belief to the common phrase, “An entrepreneur is someone who works twelve hours a day for himself so he doesn’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else.”
Of course, we’re both right, just as we’re both wrong. If there is one thing I have learned in my brief (so far) stint working with Wasabi Ventures, it’s that entrepreneurship is at the same time very complex and exceedingly simple. There is as much passion and interest as there is frustration and routine.
The beauty of language is the incredible quantity of layers of meaning behind each and every word. Love. Faith. Forgiveness. Hope. Life. Death. And yes, entrepreneurship, too. Each of these can mean a different thing at a different time and to a different person. And yet we all say we know what they mean.
So, what has the word come to mean to me after six months working for a company that seems to studiously avoid using it to describe themselves, even though I’m sure nearly every one of their employees has said it at least once when describing what they do? It means taking on work in which you have no interest while you slave away on something uncertain about which you are passionate. It means answering work emails when you come home at two in the morning after a night out. It means explosions of creative energy when you’re out running errands that you frantically try to record on your cellular telephone. It means running through your plan for the next day as you lay down to sleep; then again in the morning as you’re getting up. It means adapting to work on other people’s schedules to make use of their unique talents. It means sending your outsourced developers a whole week’s worth of work on Sunday because combating the time difference all week would lose too much time. It means trying, succeeding, failing, and retrying often all in the same day.
It means all this, and so much more. But most of all I like what my friend said: it means working hard to realize your dream — to create something great from something small.
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