An article titled "When You Should Quit Being An Entrepreneur" was posted yesterday morning on Business Insider. It struck a nerve, so I wanted to put some of my thoughts down.

The word entrepreneur has become so common, most people actually have no problem spelling it.  In that time, what the word means has taken on two definitions. Explicitly, being an entrepreneur means:

A person who organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk. (source)

However, over the past 10 years or so, an entrepreneur has implicitly come to mean someone who creates. A maker.

As Zach Klein pointed out this morning on Twitter, this is something we’re going to start to see as positions within companies – previously referred to as an “intrapreneur”. It’s not uncommon to see “entrepreneurial” listed on a job req as a desired trait of a potential employee.

This is entirely different than the explicit definition that seems to be coupled with being a founder.  I, myself, am often referred to as an entrepreneur, but have never founded a company. This is with the exception of a sun-setted skinnyCorp music project called 15 Megs of Fame that I technically co-founded with the founders of Threadless while working there.  Even in that case, this was a project I had an idea for, brought to the table, and we decided to do it. Had I not been a co-founder of that company, it would have simply been another internal skinnyCorp project that I came up with an idea for, as a entrepreneur/intrapreneur/maker.

I do (sorta) agree with the last two sentences of the article, however.

Maybe it's time to help someone else make their dream really big. Tomorrow's companies depend on it. Plus that corporate experience could be what makes your next startup a success.

I'd like to found my own company someday. But without having worked in (and with) startups over the last 10+ years, I wouldn't feel ready. I know more than a few people who are serial founders, but have never actually worked for someone else.  While I disagree that the experience should be corporate, I do agree that the best way to learn what to do (or not to do) is by experiencing work from the perspective of an employee.

Just as it doesn’t make sense to build a product for a market you know nothing about, being a manager without ever have been managed puts you at a major disadvantage.

To wrap up, I want to point out that Alyson praises the team at Gowalla for throwing in the towel and admitting “failure”.   Sure, in the battle of check-ins, Foursquare has come out on top. This has nothing to do with Josh Williams quitting being an entrepreneur. You’d be crazy to think he won’t continue to be one at Facebook.

You can’t throw in the towel on being an entrepreneur – at least not if you follow the implicit definition.  To be one is to be driven by a deep-seated passion of being a maker, and that passion isn’t something you can just quit.