Ask HN: How do you define an entrepreneur?

[xoptions]

An entrepreneur is not a label limited to founders only. I believe every person working on an innovative product is an entrepreneur, irrespective of stage of the company. What are the traits of such people?

[speedgoose]

Your definition goes a bit against the usual definition : https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entrepreneur

However it could fit a little bit the second less common French definition, where the word is coming from : https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/entrepreneur

But it would require the person to actually take the decisions and to lead. An average employee working on an innovative product doesn't fit the definition.

[xoptions]

I agree that it requires one to lead and take decisions. I am not limited to the usual definition. I want to know if you agree or disagree with the usual definition. By the way, leadership reminds me of an excellent essay, Solitude and Leadership by William Deresiewicz: https://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/

[Archelaos]

A person who runs her own business and risks a considerable part of her own money and time for it. So the typical farmer is an entrepreneur, the typical manager is not.

[xoptions]

That is what I am trying to contest here, a manager can also be an entrepreneur. One does not need to own a business to be an entrepreneur. I believe it is a mindset. Even a manager running P&L of a division can be an entrepreneur if one can deliver on ways to create products/ services to improve lives of customers/ users.

[Archelaos]

I think that the term "entrepreneur" is so fuzzy that there are many different meanings that may well contradict each other. Since your question was phrased very subjectively, I chose the destinction that I found most revealing.

In business, each of us first acts individually. The question is how we meaningfully identify roles in this context. "Entrepreneurs" und "managers" are perhaps not specific enough roles to provide us with valuable insights. Consider your criteria of being able to "deliver on ways to create products/ services to improve lives of customers/ users". This is in no way limited to people who we typically call entrepreneurs. Everyone who has a creative job or volunteer work does this or contributes to it. So if it is not sufficient to characterize an entrepreneur, is it at least required? -- I do not think that neither inovation nor success is a mandatory criteria for the general use cases of the term.

Nevertheless, it might be worth asking what an innovative and successful entrepreneur has in common with an innovative and successful manager and what might distinguish them from each other. As a thought experiment, we can imagine one and the same person (= one mindset) once as the owner and once as the manager of the same business. Would the business decisions always be the same?

[t_christensen]

I dont think innovation is a requirement. Entrepreneurs also built great businesses that's neither original or advanced from other products existing.

[xoptions]

Yes, sometimes even an incremental improvement can create great businesses. e.g. Freshworks, earlier known as Freshdesk, started as an economical version of Zendesk.

[brudgers]

An entrepreneur makes money while they sleep.