Entrepreneur: Hands on individual.
Successful Entrepreneur: With a good idea and willing to expose himself during hard times.

posted April 12, 2007

characteristics: Vision and Passion

Vision as have a vision on how the product fits in the market place and how it could be aligned with larger players. Vision as can see the big picture of how the company he starts can be built...in other word, not just building the product.

Questions: Describe how your company fits in the marketplace in 5 years.

See also my blog post "What is your product?"

Links:

• http://www.mounirshita.com/2007/03/what-is-your-product.html

posted April 12, 2007

What is your purpose?

posted April 12, 2007

Characteristics: The one who actually DOES it (who acts on the right opportunity at the right time). Of course the adjunct things are to be able to see the opportunity, to be able to have a vision, long-term, short-term goals, passion, foresightedness etc ... but without DOING it, nothing else matters.

Question: when did you recognize the opportunity was right and when did you actually act on pursuing it?

posted April 12, 2007

I think the most important common characterstic of successful entrepreneurs is driving hard towards his/her goal with flexibility.

Question: What would you do if your business model isn't working after about 6 months of trying hard?

posted April 12, 2007

Important common characteristics:

Vision, ability to manage time and capital, ability to lead, ability to listen and learn, ability to adapt to changes very fast, ability to know when to exit a plan, ability to raise money, ability to move forward the plan very fast within the opportunity time window he will have.

Question: You have a startup company and after 3 years you are not able to deliver your vision and your competition is moving ahead from you, what would you do? Move forward? if yes how? Retreat and exit? If yes how?

Bill

posted April 12, 2007

A willingness to take a calculated risk.

What differentiates you from the people that will go to work for you?

posted April 12, 2007

Entrepreneurs seem to have high levels of emotional intelligence especially in the area of self-management. I would use a behavioral interview style question based on problem-solving.
Nancy Havill

posted April 12, 2007

You need a combination of characteristics:

* Vision, conditioned by real Business Acumen - not much point in having a clear vision of a business idea that is unworkable or unrealistic.

* Make-it-happen ability, across all or most areas of the business - there will be many challenging obstacles, and successful entrepreneurs find a way over/around/through them, often seeing solutions that others don't.

* Driving passion, and the leadership ability to transfer that passion to others

To uncover those characteristics, you could ask: Why will this business succeed and how will you make it happen? ...and drill in devil's advocate style, asking yourself: Does your confidence grow with his/her answers? Is the plan concrete and real or vague and abstract? Has this person overcome difficulty or setbacks in business before? Are you inspired by the vision? Do you feel a temptation to join the business?

posted April 12, 2007

I'm not sure if this is the absolute most important characteristic, but I think a successful entrepreneur is realistic. Many people have ideas and try to start businesses, but not enough of them understand that:

1) There is always competition, even if there's no similar product
2) Investors are there to make back their money many times over
3) Getting paying customers is a lot harder than you think
4) Getting to break-even takes a lot longer than you think
5) Most companies fail.

posted April 12, 2007

Looking at more Tangible traits-- Good Salesmanship (being able to sell yourself and your ideas to clients, investors, employees, partners etc.) Vision and passion play into this trait.

I would ask -- tell me how you would go about convincing me to leave my cushy job as a VC to go work for you? Explain to me why this is soooo important?

posted April 12, 2007

Ans: Perseverance during (long) periods of dry spell before the rain comes.

Q: What's the hardest thing you've ever done in your life and how did you finally achieve it?

posted April 12, 2007

1. Focus
2. Who is your customer and why is your product a 'must have' vs the competition?

posted April 12, 2007

Patience

Question:
- So, you're an entrepreneur, How?

OR

- What makes you think you are /will be a successful entrepreneur?

Hope it helps!
Devesh
devesh.dwivedi@gmail.com

posted April 12, 2007

Totally lacking in the ability to understand the entire concept of "no", "later", "it's time to stop", or "you can't..."

True entrepreneurs are driven beyond societal norms that stop or discourage others by the clarity of their vision and do not need or want the validation of others to reinforce their worldview.

posted April 12, 2007

Dogged persistence.

Question: At what point do you give up...?

posted April 12, 2007

Tenacity coupled with raw intellectual ability.

posted April 12, 2007

Drive, dedication, determination, hard work, realistic expectations and the willingness to stick it out and make it successful.

Sheilah

posted April 12, 2007

Hello David;

Your query looks quite familiar. Here is my take that I have been using regularly.

Key Entrepreneurial Characteristics: Creative Problem Solving
Question: What's the problem you are trying to solve ?

with best wishes
Lolla

Links:

• http://www.cvmark.com

posted April 13, 2007

Positive attitude.

If you had a cash shortage and were struggling to make payroll, how would you motivate your employees to stay with you through the difficult times?

posted April 13, 2007

Characteristic: Successful entrepreneurs are spell-binding.

Great enterprises don't happen alone. Getting the right help at the right time from the right people at the right price is the key. Inspiring others to make that happen is what is required. Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to get people intrigued, fascinated, even obsessed with their ventures and voyages. Under the spell of a successful entrepreneur, people are known to contribute capital, labor, contracts, and contacts -- often on faith, not even sure always why they feel so compelled to assist or participate.

I have often read that successful entrepreneurs have vision and passion -- it is true -- but so do unsuccessful ones. I think the quality of being spell-binding is what separates the two.

Question: "How are you?" A successful entrepreneur will make his/her mark within a few seconds of the opening of a conversation. Their body language commands attention; their conversation shapes the thinking of others. But look not for the chief, the "social lion"; look instead for the medicine man, for this clever, sometimes mysterious, perhaps even awkward, but definitely interesting and compelling person will be the successful entrepreneur who gathers the necessary ideas and forces on favorable terms and produces victory.

posted April 13, 2007

Common characteristics of a successful entrepreneur: passion, vision, honesty with themselves, thinking outside the box, thoughtful decisive decision-making, comfort with ambiguity, know what they do not know, multi-tasking and leadership.

My experience in evaluating start-up business plans and working with entrepreneurs has shown me the above traits are all needed. You can not pick just one trait as there is a huge number of things/events the entrepeneur must be able to deal with. If I had to pick one, I would say the person must understand and respect their personal limitations -- it is foolhardy to assume that a person can do every task at a top level; you must know your weak spots / areas outside the core competency and hire / contract out appropriately.

Question: Given your business, what is your core competency/value proposition and where does your skill set / team's skill set not match what is needed to succeed in the core competency?

If the person does not know their weakness / holes, they have clearly not thought the business plan sufficiently and will most likely fail.

posted April 13, 2007

There is only one characteristic that matters if you have to distill it down like that: Successful entrepreneurs are rich

Question to ask: Have you made money being an entrepreneur?

Like it or not, financial success in this case proxies for all other characteristics. If they've made money before, they are likely to make more in the future.

posted April 13, 2007

Entrepreneurial success is about People. I am assuming you are asking from a point of view that you are already interested in the idea, and therefore it is about finding (entrepreneur) "the right Jockey to bet on". If so it is about People - The ability to attract and sustain a great team (stage based), manage them, clearly communicate and inspire talented people to drive to the vision, this also includes a deep passion for the customer (the other set of people key to success).

You can never be sure if the idea is good, but a customer centric Entrepreneur who can attract and inspire a winning team will give the company the best shot at success and inspire their team through the winding road to get there. I would ask question on how they attracted the team in the past, have past team members followed them, what happened to the team in the past when things were tough, and listen for customer centric points of view on the product or service. …Oh, and it helps if they have roots in Seattle ;-)

Links:

• http://www.schwartzgroup.com

posted April 13, 2007

Why?!!!

No, I am not questioning your own questions; I am answering your second question. The "Why?" - the Purpose and the Motivation - behind the endeavour, is the most important question to ask to understand the potential for success.

Is the person driven by fame? By fortune? By notoriety? By a social purpose? By a desire to change the rules of the game (Sir Richard Branson's "why", btw)?

Now on to the most important characteristics - your first question:

1. A Purpose other than money
- nothing wrong (al all !) with getting rich, but it is a *consequence* in highly successful endeavours... not a *cause*; "money as a purpose" is the reason many entrepreneurial activities fail

2. An intuition to understand the market needs and how to create value
- more than a formal know-how of how to implement the system that'll deliver it: that's *management*, and most entrepreneurs fare much better on getting better people than themselves for this part of the work; they are usually much more visionary than operational

3. Supperb communication skills
- in line with my previous point, if you are to recruit the best people to manage your dream... you better be a master at laying out a compelling future

4. An absolute determination to succeed, combined with the wisdom to know when to stop
- a Persistence/Resilience trait combined with the intuition to know when all possible actions and then some (or many more) have been pursued, and an idea is still not going to take off - when it's time to cut your loses

5. The most difficult of the traits - and also one of the most important: the capability of selecting the right people for the *team* that'll build the dream and turn it into reality
- after the idea is set, and *before* the plans on what to do to implement it, the right people need to be secured (as to what is *right*, I'd say this is out of the scope of this answer, but I offer one major concept to ponder on: *alignment of purpose*).

"Let's get the right people on the bus; get the wrong people off the bus... *then* we'll see how to drive the bus."

Cheers,
Miguel

posted April 13, 2007

Self Awareness, Compassion, and passion.

posted April 13, 2007

Integrity.

There are countless definitions of what, who and how are entrepreneurs. There are countless definitions of the meaning of "success". And there are countless traits and characteristics of both successful entrepreneurship and successful leadership. Much of it is myth and folklore, and much of it is the result of decades of academic research, which has yet to be definitive. Moreover, success is interdependent with time, and a key test of success, is does it withstand the sands of time. Are we asking about entrepreneurs who lead an organization for 30 years, or serial entrepreneurs who start them up? The arena of entrepreneurship is fraught with complexity and definitional variability.

But there is one least common denominator. An entrepreneur must lead, through good times and bad and through the stages and travails of personal and organizational transformation. This means leading individuals, groups, the organization as a whole, and stakeholders as well. It also means leading oneself. It has been shown that the

Entrepreneurial leadership is a highly dynamic continuum, full of paradoxes such as the differences between leadership and management. Drucker suggest that leadership is about the management of change, while management is about the management of complexity. But these lines are blurred and confused, and the two are diametrically opposed. Leadership is about risk and adaptability. Management is about limiting risk and maximizing reproducibility of productivity. Hence an entrepreneur must have the leadership characteristics to ride and continuously changing continuum of dynamically opposing forces and challenges of growth.

And yet throughout this, the number one metric of leadership is trustworthiness, and the number one metric of trust is integrity, meaning personal authenticity and congruence, where "what you see is what you get". Personal integrity is the measure of how a person is in action, how a person embodies their beliefs, how a person can hold and carry forth a vision and mission. But most importantly, it is what followers follow over the long term, and the key is the long-term. Followers will intellectually, emotionally and intuitively measure the integrity of their leader(s) against their own values and their doctrines of fairness, and will over time decide to what measure they place their fate in the hands of their leader(s). Moreover, the integrity of an organization is a direct reflection of the integrity of its leadership, and the marketplace will also measure the integrity of the organization's brand, its' products and services and its market presence. Hence the long-term survival of an organization also depends upon the integrity of its leadership.

The question is ask is "how do you lead?"

posted April 14, 2007

We (my partner and I) call it "Fierce Sense of Ownership". Not waiting for validation, money, markets, or anything else; plunges ahead and makes it happen.

posted April 15, 2007