When I was a kid growing up in the late 1970’s and early
1980’s I would sometimes ask my dad what he did for a living. And each time he would reply the same. “I’m an entrepreneur,” he would say
proudly. “Look it up.” So I did.
The dictionary defined an entrepreneur as “a person who organizes and
manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable
initiative and risk.” My dad was right –
he was an entrepreneur. And a lousy one
at that.
He raised money from investors and for years worked out of
his home (and this was before working from one’s home was acceptable) where he
supervised a handful of misfit and quirky programmers who worked odd hours
developing a bookkeeping application based on a patent he held in his
name. Until the money ran out. And when that happened he took his unfinished
product to market where he suffered painful project after painful project. And (of course) he timed his product launch
perfectly with Intuit’s latest iteration of QuickBooks, which was infinitely
better, faster, more reliable and cheaper than his.
I know this firsthand because in 1994 I left my job, formed
my own company, and partnered with him.
For six years I also struggled to sell and implement his terrible,
incomplete and poorly designed bookkeeping software. Mercifully, the year 2000 “bug” took us both
out of our misery, rendering the software unworkable. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. We were forced to change directions and
resell software products made by other companies. Since then I’ve managed to do what my father
was never able to accomplish: earn a
profit.
“I’m an entrepreneur,” my dad would keep telling me. OK. My
dad was an entrepreneur. Just not a very
good one. I learned from that. My company has grown to ten people.
