[amandalim89]

I disagree. I think selling your company doesn't make you any less of an entrepreneur (btw jobs did sell his companies NeXT to Apple in 1997 and Pixar to Disney in 2006). The Paypal founders sold to Ebay for 1.5B and many of them went on to do other great and innovative things with that capital. I think being entrepreneurial means having the passion to start new things and sometimes that requires you to sell your old company/ies to fund it. I admire the courage to sell a successful/profitable company in order to built something from scratch again. Elon Musk said: I think it's better to try doing something which requires low capital as kind of your first company. With the success of that, then take capital from that and plow it into your second company. That's what I did, basically. http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/elon-musk-starting-a-compan...

[aprjoy]

Hmm...I have a feeling that his statement wasn't really directed at serial, game-changing entrepreneurs like Elon Musk (and himself, as you point out). But there are some people who start companies with the express intent of selling them and aren't necessary worried about them lasting for generations. Whether that makes them not true entrepreneurs, I don't know; I guess Steve Jobs would have said not. But I think they are a different breed than Musk et al.