On entrepreneurship

April 10, 2021

Entrepreneurship is defined as "the activity of setting up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit". I hate that definition. It's way too exclusive. I'd define it as:

Entrepreneurship is about building a social system that can influence the external environment faster and faster towards the end vision, and it's doing that by evolving the internal mechanics for the purpose of becoming better and better at affecting such change unto the environment.

I like this definition because it's not exclusive to what your end goal is - if it's profit, so be it, but it's also inclusive to mission-driven companies as well. It also mentions that building a company is a social endeavor, not in the sense that you cannot do it on your own (you can have one-person businesses), but you need and depend on the interaction with other people for your business to make sense and be successful (whatever the metric for that may be), i.e. you are required to participate in economy dynamics. And finally, it speaks about what the company *is* and what the job of executives in it is - to set the destination and learn how to get there, by constantly iterating and validating their knowledge, trying, failing, pivoting. It's about creating a system that learns how to best scale itself up so that it can scale up the impact it has, i.e. making a positive feedback loop between internal ability to scale and an actual external scaling.

Some more quotes:

"Startups are extreme machines." (by Sam Altman, based on this tweet)

"Entrepreneurship is a personal growth engine disguised as a business pursuit." (tweet by James Clear)