December 5th marked my second year of blogging personally (I had previously been a corporate blogger for 7 years at Bazaarvoice as our CEO). I began blogging primarily as a service to entrepreneurs - a form of giving back to the community that I believe is the greatest force for change. If you are wondering why my blog is named Lucky7, it is as a tribute to my amazing mother, who passed away two years ago. Myfirst Lucky7 post on December 5, 2012 was a revisit of my manifesto written to the Bootstrap Austin community on March 15, 2005, months prior to starting Bazaarvoice. Much has changed in the nine years since and it wasn't unusual at all for Austin startups to raise seed capital vs. bootstrapping in 2014.
How I define the soul of entrepreneurs: you change the world (part 3 of 3)
You create the future. Others dream about it, some write about it, many read about it. But the rare few actually create it. You are one of those rare people, and you are to be cherished by humanity for being so brave to define the future for all the rest.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
You create the jobs. There is no company that anyone goes to work for that didn't have a brave creator at the beginning of it all. Your company can grow beyond you, but no one at your company today would be there if it were not for you giving birth.
You define the soul of the company. It was your unreasonableness, your "craziness", your dream, and, perhaps most importantly, your values that were seeded in its birth. Others can lead and tap into that soul, but if it weren't for you there would have been no soul in the first place.