To be honest, I'm on the side that not all entrepreneurs are the same. Here are certain criteria that I measure an entrepreneur by:

- Commitment to the idea
- Sacrifices made to achieve success
- Impact of the startup (does it have global or local impact?)
- Leadership ability
- Investment into the startup
- Sheer hustle and energy spent to succeed

Though I love your post and want to full-heartedly agree, I think there is a clear difference between a good entrepreneur and just a business owner.

The entrepreneur creates systems and works ON his company. The business owner does all the work himself and works IN his company.

You know, this is a good blog post. Expect a longer comment in my upcoming blog post

And I have to say that I agree with everyone else here…at the end of the day it IS a mindset and I don't think the semantics are as important as what you are achieving.

I think whenever anyone buys something huge (like a business) they usually have a vision, and it would be very rare for that to match up with the original owner's vision. It's hard to know where to draw the line with the entrepreneur definition. In the case of a large company where the executive gets most of his/her pay in stock options, I wouldn't consider him/her an entrepreneur unless s/he was a founder.

An important caveat here is that I'm talking about direct financial risk as it relates to the success or failure of the business. There are obviously other risks inherent in entrepreneurship that have secondary effects for your career and personal life.

With that said, greater-than-average risk is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for entrepreneurship. Ownership, on the other hand, is quite necessary. Add to the equation the initiative that I spoke of earlier and you might just be on the right track in creating sufficient conditions for entrepreneurship.

Where things start getting hairy is when you point out that executives at large corporations have both initiative (they are managers) and ownership (they get hefty stock options). My answer to that would be that they are entrepreneurs if they had a significant role in the formation of their company or their particular division therein. So, actually applying the initial impetus of the venture should be an important part of the “initiative”.

Another potential problem with my definition (bear with me) is that a person who buys an existing business could be considered an entrepreneur, but didn't actually “initiate” the business. I would contend that in many of these cases the purchaser intends to do something quite different with the business once establishing ownership. For example, a person taking over a failed bar or restaurant might simply be buying the liquor license to end up doing something quite different with the establishment. In a different scenario, the purchaser could be drastically changing the ownership structure. Even if the business operations go unchanged, I would posit that someone buying a business under an LBO model would certainly be an entrepreneur.

In the case that a buyer isn't changing anything at all with the business, the person is simply buying a job and a lifestyle. I would consider this toward the lower end of the entrepreneurial scale, but I'm not ready to say that the person isn't an entrepreneur.

You're right about the three terms being different, but not mutually exclusive. In most cases I see entrepreneur as a term than encompasses the other two, depending on the type of small business/self-employment. But really, they are just different types of businesses. It's like comparing a football player to a swimmer to a cheerleader. They are all really different types of athletes.

In terms of the entrepreneur mindset, I just meant you didn't need a tangible product to be an entrepreneur. It is about what you do – but a lot of what you do when you start a company is think. The idea is still just an idea.

I didn't call anyone bitchy, really. It's explained above.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment!

There is probably something to Carlos' point – Most of us take pride in the work we do. When we care about something, we are more likely to react.