Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2013; Pozin’s companies and his writing for LinkedIn and Forbes are described as of that year, and Charlie Munger, referred to in the present tense, died in November 2023.
Why do you want to be an entrepreneur? Most people give many different answers. Most of them would probably tell us they want their own company so they don’t have to put up with a boss, and that they want to be entrepreneurs to make a lot of money.
Those are probably the wrong reasons. If we asked Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett‘s right-hand man, he admires his boss and is rolling in money. And yet he is not an entrepreneur.
In fact, the statistics on failure and disappointment among entrepreneurs have risen since people started their own businesses driven by necessity and by money. Tell me, Mr Ilya Pozin… why are you an entrepreneur? Look at his answer.
Ilya Pozin is the founder of two companies, Ciplex and OpenMe, and he also spends a large part of his time writing on his LinkedIn profile and for Forbes. He says that most people don’t understand how he went from being a lonely geek to owning a multimillion-dollar business.
For Ilya, what matters is not so much how he got there, but why
Or rather, why he started out and decided to become an entrepreneur. As Guy Kawasaki says, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Kawasaki meant that we don’t all go into business for the same reasons or with the same intentions. Ilya’s answer is admirable, to say the least:
“I have an uninhibited love for what I do every day. That is something I have found and that most people still can’t say. For most people, the idea of work, even in a home office, has negative connotations.
Almost everyone hates the word work, because it suggests effort and sacrifice, and they are constantly looking for a way to balance work and life so that work doesn’t take over their personal life as well.
For me, the love I have for what I do is monumental, because it is my personal and professional goal. To me, it is crazy that people want to separate professional and personal life, or put a barrier between them, when they really should complement each other.
My passion for my work and my flexibility as a business founder have allowed me to set up my life so that the personal and professional sides fit together perfectly. In fact, I was recently able to take paternity leave and work from home after the birth of my second daughter.”
Source: LinkedIn, “Why I’m an Entrepreneur”
For Ilya, entrepreneurs can work whenever they want, wherever they want and however they want. For him, that is one of the beauties of being an entrepreneur, among other things because, he says, he has designed his companies to work this way, especially if you hire competitive people who are as passionate as you are.
“I want to make life easier for others and make money doing it”
Ilya is an entrepreneur because, he says, he is constantly focused on the future. He is always thinking of 1,000 ways to make life better for others, especially for his children as they grow up. In fact, “the worries he has today about his children’s future are tomorrow’s business.”
“I want to teach others, as I was once taught”
Ilya says he would not have had the success he has had if it weren’t for his old mentor, Tom Antion, who advised and guided him when he was a teenager. He is so grateful that, for Ilya, teaching others is part of his journey as an entrepreneur. In fact, it is one of the key components of everything he does.
“As a founder, I have learned a lot of business lessons, and it would be unfair not to share them with others, just as my mentor shared his wisdom with me.
In short, I do what I do because of the passion I feel for my career, for making the world a much better place and for influencing others in a positive way. That is why I’m an entrepreneur.”
Meanwhile, Eugene Salganik, co-founder of FunderHut, sums up in a single sentence why he wanted to be an entrepreneur:
“There comes a point when you feel the need to stop following the rules and start making and creating your own.”
My favourite answer, though, may be the one from Victoria Bernal, who tells us:
“Why am I an entrepreneur?… The question should really be ‘why not?’. I can’t think of anything else to do, and I’m probably not cut out for anything else. One of the things I like is that an entrepreneur is never unemployed. Things can go better or they can go worse; you can succeed or you can fail. If you succeed, you celebrate, and if you fail, you try again until you can celebrate a success.
Ever since I was a little girl I read the great thinkers and business people, and one phrase stuck with me: ‘every effort an entrepreneur makes is an investment in themselves’. Every defeat and every success depends on you alone. There is always something to build.
One of my motivations as a child was to be able to give work to a lot of people, because my father taught me when I was little that great entrepreneurs, at the final judgement and throughout history, are measured not by the money they made but by the good they did for society.
I couldn’t say exactly what I like about having my own company; perhaps it is a combination of many factors. But I am very clear about what I don’t like about having my own company, and that is finding myself having to let go of someone who does a good job.
Over time, when I see that hard times may be coming, my biggest motivation is to focus my efforts on not putting at risk the jobs of a workforce of good employees. The thought that one day I might have to do without workers who have been with me for so many years is probably the only thing that could keep me awake at night.”
And you… why do you want to be an entrepreneur?
Further reading
- What to do if you want to start your own business but have no business experience
- Small businesses: how Sara Rotman did it
Featured image: Alejandro Escamilla alejandroescamilla, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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