What Makes Them Entrepreneurial? #34
Aditya August 12th
Their Excitement to Make Impact on a Significant Number of People
Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs
Ben Casnocha asks a very interesting question on his blog.
Can making money be the prime motivator when starting a business?
My take is that in the short-term (0-2 years after founding): Yes. In the long term: it's not enough and a genuine passion for what the business is doing and the customers it's serving is a necessary additive.
If your business survives until the long-term, generating the passion shouldn't be hard. If you start a trash pick-up service, maybe at first you see it as just a cash cow business. After all, who can get fired up about waste management? But eventually, as the business grows, and you start to serve tens of thousands of customers, you can get passionate about the idea of impact on a large scale.
Impact is the entrepreneur's drug of choice and if a company gets to a point where it is impacting a significant number of people I would argue any founder / executive can find a way to become genuniely excited about the mission above and beyond simply making money (which is an acceptable if not ideal driver for the founders at the outset).
My take is that in the short-term (0-2 years after founding): Yes. In the long term: it's not enough and a genuine passion for what the business is doing and the customers it's serving is a necessary additive.
If your business survives until the long-term, generating the passion shouldn't be hard. If you start a trash pick-up service, maybe at first you see it as just a cash cow business. After all, who can get fired up about waste management? But eventually, as the business grows, and you start to serve tens of thousands of customers, you can get passionate about the idea of impact on a large scale.
Impact is the entrepreneur's drug of choice and if a company gets to a point where it is impacting a significant number of people I would argue any founder / executive can find a way to become genuniely excited about the mission above and beyond simply making money (which is an acceptable if not ideal driver for the founders at the outset).
As said above, the desire to make money can be short-term motivation of any entrepreneur, but the desire to make meaning and impact on a significant number of people can be the main driver of all entrepreneurial personalities.
Note: To read more articles from this series, please visit: What Makes Them Entrepreneurial?
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What Makes Them Entrepreneurial? #35 at Aditya Kothadiya
14 Apr 09 at 8:06 pm