Entrepreneur is a person who owns and operates a business.

The word entrepreneur originates from the French word, entreprendre, which
means “to undertake.” In a business context, it means to start a business.

People generally start a business for different reasons. Sometimes it is because they are good at
their chosen profession and they feel that they can make a better living working for themselves,
sometimes it is a lifestyle change and sometimes it is simply a lifelong dream.

Speaking about entrepreneurship, Professor K. Vesper of the University of Washington says that
“Business continue to be launched by people who didn’t make it the first time around. A driving
force in entrepreneurship is addictiveness. Once people have a taste of freedom in a business of
their own, they like it. They don’t want to go back to working for someone else.”

Running a business requires many skills that take time to develop. Entrepreneurs need inspiration,
motivation and sensibility. An entrepreneur is usually:

 a positive thinker and a decision maker;

 has an enthusiastic vision, the driving force of an enterprise;
 exhibits extreme optimism in the decision-making processes;
 is prone to overconfidence and overgeneralizations.

The essence of entrepreneurship is taking risk. Many small businesses fail within the first five
years. The two main reasons are:
 a lack of initial capital and
 a lack of marketing ability.

There are four types of entrepreneurs: 1) the innovator; 2) the calculating inventor; 3) the over-
optimistic
promoter, and 4) the organization builder. These types are not related to the personality but to the
type of opportunity the entrepreneur faces.

Successful entrepreneurs often follow one or more of the following paths:

 unexpected opportunities;
 changing market conditions;
 improving a product or process;
 providing an alternative product or service;
 identifying population trends.

The American magazine Venture attempted to dissect entrepreneurs and to see what makes them
tick. They surveyed 2,740 people. Here what they have in common:

1) typically they were firstborn children who had a positive relationship with their father;
2) they held jobs before they were 15 and started their business by the time they reached 20;
3) they borrowed money to launch their first business and made themselves personally liable;
4) most of them are college graduates, start work early in the day (82% start work before 9 a.m.);
5) 20% described themselves as successful.

Entrepreneurs can be also described as mercurial, that is, prone to insights, brainstorms,
deceptions, ingeniousness and resourcefulness; cunning, opportunistic, creative, and
unsentimental.