I have to top this homemade zombie costume I wore in 2006 (last year I borrowed a fairie costume from a fashion designer, but that was cheating).  This is a 1960s evening gown from Value Village.

I’ve noticed many 30-second elevator pitches indicate a company’s size and scope, such as “Expeditors International is a Fortune 500 global logistics provider” or “Pelago is an early stage company building Whrrl”.

When does a company go from being a startup to being “early stage”, or a “small business”?  Milestones for making the jump could be:

• X number of employees (30? 50?) and/or someone dedicated to HR full time
• Heavy funding, or no expectation of taking additional funding
• Existed longer than X period of time (4 years? 7 years?)
• Enough revenue to keep your business alive, or profitable (now or in the past)
• Publicly traded, or are part of a merger or acquisition

Keeping the “Feel” of a Startup

I can understand the desire to identify your business as a startup, even when you’re technically not one anymore.  Maybe some companies call themselves startups for longer than they should because they want to project a particular company culture:

• Fast moving (running 100mph every day), with a sense of racing the clock
• Scrappy and frugal when it comes to spending money
• Open to new ideas, new directions, and able to seize opportunity quickly
• Innovative and inventive, nothing is set in stone yet, no bureaucracy

You Can’t Deny Reality

So why does this matter? It matters because saying, “It’s okay, we’re a startup” becomes a cop-out eventually. Saying this to potential employees, investors, or customers when it isn’t true comes off as disingenuous and smacks of enormous denial of reality. Denial of reality (think ostrich with its head in the sand) is my number one red flag when dealing with other people.  I find the inability to see the world as it truly is, is rarely a one-time error.  Usually, it can be found to be a systemic flaw in thinking that rarely results in success.

Some companies cling to the title of startup even when they are heavily funded businesses, hiding behind the label as an excuse for not having reached profitability.  Being a startup is like being an entrepreneur, it’s a temporary state.  You can be entrepreneurial but not an entrepreneur just as you can be scrappy and innovative without being a startup.  In the best case scenario the entrepreneur becomes a successful businessman and the startup becomes a successful business.

Breakdown of Business Types

Startup:  a new company, working on building proof of concept

Early Stage:  has achieved proof of concept, working on building revenues

Business:  a company with revenues, working on achieving profitability

Successful Business: a profitable company

In the upper left-hand corner there’s a text blurb where I describe myself, and it says, “23 year old entrepreneur…”.  Well, actually it said ‘entreprenuer’ until an anonymous commenter was nice enough to point out my spelling mistake on my bio page.  This same commenter asked what makes me an entrepreneur, and my first reaction was to jump to the defense of all my projects and work; instead I looked up the definition of ‘entrepreneur’.  The Wikipedia entry is probably the most useful for getting a good definition, as well as some interesting references:

An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a company, enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. In common understanding it is taken as describing a dynamic personality.

As I wandered to the shower (where I do my best thinking) I asked my husband, “am I an entrepreneur?” and he responded, “Well, life has a lot of risk”.  After my shower I asked him again and he said, “no, you’re not right now”.  He’s right.

Although I generate content and work on various projects beyond my day job, it isn’t part of any system that forms an enterprise.  I’ve been an entrepreneur on a very small scale in the past, when I ran little businesses like web design or teaching people how to use their computers.  However, right now I’m more of wantreprenuer with many ideas and a continuously growing stockpile of knowledge and understanding of what people want, but no business to show for it yet. 

Right now, I’m finding people I can learn from about pitching, financing, filtering through good ideas and bad.  I’m also building a network that I hope will someday consist of potential customers, partners, advisors, employees and investors.  The tech community in Seattle is a big change from the networking I’ve done in the past, in finance and in international trade.  It’s refreshing; people tell you what they really think of your ideas and they’re excited about seeing you make them a reality.  Being involved in the community helps me meet people who can give me a sanity check, or suggest problems that need solving.  I’m still learning more about myself, and what kind of business I want to work on and live with for several years.

In the meantime, I’m working for a Web 2.0 (or 3.0, whatever that means) company learning all sorts of different things.  In the past year I’ve learned how to use Linux, mySQL, manage bloggy goodness with WordPress like a champ, and furthered my MS Excel guru status through even greater utilization of Visual Basic.  I’m also learning to give interviews and speak publicly, which I’ve discovered I enjoy and hope to someday be truly good at.  Most recently, I’ve been learning to blog to a public audience about more than just my day-to-day life.

So, am I an entrepreneur?  No, not right now.  If it didn’t have such a negative connotation, I’d call myself a wantrepreneur.  Instead, I’ll go with ‘entrepreneur in training’ – I’ll fix my tagline.

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Who’s Weighing In?

Seattle entrepreneur Marcelo Calbucci says:

“The Wikipedia definition of entrepreneur is wrong, IMHO. Here is my definition: An entrepreneur must start something from nothing. Must create value out of thin air, either by creating a product or service, directly by his handy work or by aligning the right people to do so.  Risk is just a consequence and not “causation”.” 

Kevin and I just celebrated our one year wedding anniversary a few weeks ago, and now it sounds like he’s planning to head to China for four months on an assignment from Microsoft to work with the Chinese arm of the Sharepoint team just outside of Beijing. So clearly I’m not going to be able to take four months and go with him, although I’m going to try to visit at least twice while he’s gone.

So last night over a glass of wine with Raviv and Andrew we talked about how I was going to deal with being alone without male companionship for such an extended period of time. I have this crazy idea, which I might try to act on if I can find any interest at all, to have some fabulous women come live with me and attempt to start a blog about our adventures. Good idea? Bad idea?

Is our culture is moving towards making connections that are deeply rooted in the physical world around us using technology?  I certainly think so.  For me text just isn’t enough anymore; I crave the complexity of human interactions and the thrill and challenge that comes with meeting new people.  

Today I had a moment of serendipity that thrilled me.  I was reading this post and decided that I should email the author with some questions and thoughts.  I clicked through his contact page but there was no email address; instead there was a link to Skype.  I’m not a huge Skype user (although after this experience I don’t know why) but I figured: he posted the info, so I might as well start a chat.

Turns out Stuart Henshall is one of the founders of Phweet and in our twenty-minute-ish conversation he downloaded Whrrl (I asked if he had feedback for us) and gave me a walk through of the Phweet service.   Phweet makes it easy to connect and talk, for free, without even revealling your phone number – using Twitter usernames as your credentials.  Stuart told me that it should be able to support a very large number of users.  I can’t wait!  Think of what this means for coordinating tweetups, or even just providing customer service.

In the course of just twenty minutes I used two technologies; one that I wasn’t that familiar with and another that was brand new, and out of it I got a real human being on the other end of the line (and over a thousand miles away) and had an interesting and friendly conversation with a complete stranger.  And to top it off – I felt completely safe!  I’m going to try this out, I wonder what will happen if I get out of my comfort zone to contact more of the people who I usually just read passively. What is to stop any of us from connecting with people who interest, inspire, or even infuriate us?