When I picture the typical entrepreneur in my mind, he is well-dressed (Prada pullover, DKNY pants, Style Labs shoes and Calvin Klein accessories), drives a BMW, and works in an office where the furniture is worth more than the property. He is a go-getter and workaholic who can sell saltwater to the navy and outrageous business strategies to even the most sensible venture capitalist.
[VIDEO]Following the dot-com crash, I am going to have to learn to associate the word "entrepreneur" with a very different mental picture. You see, my definition of an entrepreneur is someone who breaks the rules of business, and makes his way of doing things work better than the established business practices. The chaps who led us down the road to the inevitable dot-bomb are, by that definition, only half-entrepreneurs. They did things differently. They couldn`t make it work.
For many, it seems their intentions were to never make their VC-sponsored businesses work: they wanted a fat salary and a lifestyle they knew couldn`t last, but was preferable to never experiencing that lifestyle at all.
Excuses, excuses
As for converting eyeballs into dollar bills, someone must have confused "dot-com start-up" and "optometrist" business plans.
Jason Norwood-Young, technology editor, ITWeb
As noted by Mike Wright in his latest Tuesday Revolution newsletter, failed dot-coms typically quoted the following excuses for their failures: "The revenue model was not fleshed out in detail"; "We couldn`t convert eyeballs to dollar bills"; "The market wasn`t ready for our bleeding-edge technology" and "The uptake of consumers was over-estimated". These sound like the excuses I used on teachers for not having done my homework.
How could a business not flesh out its revenue model in detail? That`s what running a business is all about. As for converting eyeballs into dollar bills, someone must have confused "dot-com start-up" and "optometrist" business plans.
If the dot-com market is ever going to see a resurgence -- or even survival -- it had best learn to differentiate between the real entrepreneur and the pretenders. A real entrepreneur does not wear Prada. He drives a beetle. He works from home. He is so sure of his business plan that he is willing to invest his own money in it, rather than rely only on venture capitalists whose generosity is fast drying up.
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