Today, I want to talk about a concept I discovered a couple of weeks ago, that since then stuck to my head. I told a lot of people about it, I thought hours and hours and it just can not let go of it.
It is a concept made or rather created for people that
- love building business
- are creative when it comes to business ideas
- can execute on ideas
- really enjoy the early processes of a project (the “hands-on” time as I would call it).
So, why was the concept created?
The following concept was created to formalise and organise an often wildly unorganised world of certain kind of people. Opportunity Entrepreneurs.
What is an Opportunity Entrepreneur?
An Opportunity Entrepreneur is a person, that sees opportunities everywhere and whos special talent lies in seeing & building connections where others can’t.
An Opportunity Entrepreneur knows also when to use the Opportunity, because starting a business is about timing.
And an Opportunity Entrepreneur is hands-on and can execute on Opportunities and ideas when they are fresh. This is acutally quite important. There are many many people out there, having probably billion or even trillion dollar ideas in their heads. But they are not using them. Having ideas is super easy, but executing on them is something where most people fail. An Opportunity Entrepreneur doesn’t.
And an Opportunity Entrepreneur also is able to scale and bring an idea or project to a certain point, where it is “sustainable”, or self-sustaining. Where it does not need daily attention from the founders / initiators.
We can often see this occurence especially at Opportunity Businesses. People jump on an Opportunity and start executing, but not really long enough to really create something. After a certain period of time they give up, and that often before the project is self-sustaining.
As an example, a self-sustaining project would be to build a company where you ultimately sell part of your shares to an investor and leave the company on an executive level and become more of an advisor. The work is done, the company can live a life without you.
Building companies that can live without you is actually harder than a lot of people think. So do not underestimate that component of the journey.
And, last but not least, an Opportunity Entrepreneur combines both of the two common Entrepreneur types, which are cash Entrepreneurs and visionary Entrepreneurs.
Obviously there are a lot more ways to cluster entrepreneurs, but I will use this model.
A cash Entrepreneur is someone like an e-commerce founder, who in most cases took an existing business concept and did not change it in any big way. If you are that type of entrepreneur, you are technichally also not a startup founder. Because startup founders are people who try to develop a new business without an existing business model yet. In e.g. clothing e-commerce, that is not the case in a lot of situations. There is no big disruption happening, sometimes no disruption at all.
More or less, a lot of people criticise these types of entrepreneurs are just smart business people who, thats why the name was given to them, just care about cash.
An innovation Entrepreneur is someone who primarily does not care about the money. They care more about the product or service they are building, You will find this type mostly in startups who really develop something new with a vision and try to bring innovation to a field or industry.
This type of entrepreneur is often to be found in Silicon Valley and often critiqued, since they do not always have a sustainable business model or none at all. People criticise, that they just “waste” money of investors without creating a sustainable business model.
An Opportunity Entrepreneur combines both. His identity is divided. And that is what makes him / her so poweful.
He combines the best of two worlds. the Opportunity Entrepreneur combines the ability and the focus to develop a great business model, like a good cash Entrepreneur, but he also combines the never ending will to create of the visionary Entrepreneur.
And right there, where the opportunity entrepreneur is, lies a lot of great innovation.
Innovation is simply monetised invention.
And that is, what an opportunity entrepreneur tries to do.
Also, he is not too focussed on investor money, but rahter on a big stake of “F*ck you money”.
“F*ck you money” is a cash reserve, that enables a good opportunity entrepreneur at all times to take an opportunity and to be not dependent on someone else.
This stake can be as low as just a couple months of runway of personal expenses, to be able to spend all time on one project, or as high as enough money to invest into another company.
It is really common among opportunity entrepreneurs, that they do not just do one business, but that they are involved in many things.
Keeping focus in a messy situation is a skill, that is required for good opportunity entrepreneurs.
Some do many things all with one company, like Jeff Bezos who disrupts many industries with Amazon and makes a lot of money with AWS. And others are more like Elon Musk, who work on multiple companies simultaneously.
More about the specific attributes and steps in article 2.
