The difference between entrepreneurship and venturepreneurship? Ego.
Today an ‘entrepreneur’ can mean anyone from a one-person small-town day-care business, to a member of a multi-level marketing scheme, to a fast-growth venture capital-backed mover and shaker. But the common thread of all these definitions? THE INDIVIDUAL. They’re alone.
In the United States we celebrate the cult of the ‘lone entrepreneur’ who goes from hero to zero with nothing but fifty cents in their pocket and sheer chutzpah. But that’s marketing bullshit: no entrepreneur ever succeeded alone. Every successful company was a group effort.
A venturepreneur understands from the outset that to create a fiscally sustainable result, you’ve got to create a venture – something that balances the contributions and needs of groups of people. In fact the fastest path to failure in innovation is NOT thinking about what you’re doing as a group activity.
This fundamental misunderstanding of what it takes to be successful with new ideas is one big reason why our startup failure rate is so high and why many promising creative innovators either leave prematurely.
Entrepreneurs think it’s all about them; venturepreneurs recognize it’s a different game.
