What Type Of Entrepreneur Are You?

A fun aspect of entrepreneurship is the diversity of people that you meet and the variety of ways that people have gotten to where they are.  There isn’t one single formula on how it is done, which makes the journey that more exciting.  Some start as salespeople, some investors, some from other failed or successful ventures.  Since nearly everyone has become an entrepreneur, similar to how nearly everyone in Los Angeles is an actor, I’ve noticed, through the “coffee-having,” “brain-picking,” “introduce-me-to-investors-please,” meetings that as diverse as they are, entrepreneurs fall into the same few buckets.

The Sales Person: This type of business-minded entrepreneur could sell ice to Eskimos.  In prior years they had a top tier MBA and / or did two years in a banking or consulting analyst program.  Usually the businesses that this person starts arise from the need to solve a problem, which they themselves experienced.  They have the right Rolodex for early customers and given their finance background could probably raise a small seed round.  They have the skills to create a great PowerPoint deck and a sturdy dynamic Excel financial model.  On the marketing front, they also understand the customer acquisition funnel from digital search mechanisms like Google to Facebook to Cooperatize to broader branding mechanics like content marketing and PR.  Steve Jobs and Mike Bloomberg come to mind as “sales” entrepreneurs.

PROS:

— Business focused; investors feel somewhat comfortable that they’ll know how to get their money out

— Domain knowledge; they are solving a problem that they themselves encountered and are now coming up with solutions using technology

— Financial connections to raise seed capital

Despite these great characteristics, I’ve sometimes noticed that technology is sometimes a foreign concept.  As a worst case, they treat their developers like “code monkeys.”  This lack of understanding sometimes causes tensions between this entrepreneur and their technical counterparts.  If they are waving around their deck and model and describe themselves as the “idea” person, developers and investors are less likely to believe in their ability to execute.  Selling their skills to “technical co-founders” also is difficult when they try and make the argument that once the product is made they can raise the capital.  (The developer takes the bulk of the risk by building the product for equity and then realizing that some of the original business assumptions were flawed.)  Understanding this chicken or egg problem, some sales types get around this by getting a prototype built on a site like Elance or even taking a class on Code Academy.

CONS:

— Difficult to pivot into another business

— Must depend on a technical resource

— Technology is sometimes a foreign concept; can they receive the needed respect from developers?

Read more about this topic on : http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2014/06/08/what-type-of-entrepreneur-are-you/