what it takes to be an entrepreneur...

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on May 6, 2004

Knowledge@Wharton recently had a panel on "The entrepreneur as mensch". It offers some interesting experiences from entrepreneurs:

"A gambler's daring is also not required. Although entrepreneurs are generally perceived as risk-takers, at least one panelist seems to have learned the value of caution in the course of his experience. As the leader of a dot-com that had to shut down several years ago, he said he'd had to fire many people he and his partner had hired. "The first time we had to lay people off, it really hurt. The lesson was, I don't ever want to do that again," he said. Today, he says, he hires much more slowly."

"Manners, however, may be an underrated asset. "Friends come and go," said one panelist. "Enemies accumulate. My ability to recruit in 2004 has everything to do with how I treated my partners in 2003, in 2002 - and in 1976," he explained. In his experience, every action with every human -- how you fire them, how fair you were, how much dignity you gave them, circulates. Those people "talk and talk and talk, and they'll bring traffic in," he said."

"One myth that does seem to be true: The picture of the tireless entrepreneur burning the midnight oil. Entrepreneurs on the panel warned that although they found it rewarding, the life of an entrepreneur is also all-consuming. All the panelists said that however hard they worked for someone else, they found working on their own venture much more demanding. "I think one of the biggest differences was I was always passionate about my job, but I was able to leave it behind. But I found that as an entrepreneur, during the evenings, during the weekends, when I was sleeping, when I was in the shower, even in some cases when I was with my family, I was always thinking about the business," said one. "That was a big change."