Notes From The Corpreneur: Preface
March 8, 2008 – 5:04 pm
You have Entrepreneurs and then you have Corpreneurs (sometimes referred to as Intrapreneurs). Fundamentally, the two people are one in the same. Both an Entrepreneur and a Corpreneur have that startup spirit, the driving passion, and the [sometimes] burden of constantly looking at the horizon or analyzing their idea. What it comes down to is, both people have the disorder that is entrepreneurship. When you break the foundation of Entrepreneurs and Corpreneurs apart, however, you get two very different circumstances.
An entrepreneur is someone who starts her own company. They usually secure their own funding, risking the 3 M’s (Mortage, Mastercard, and Marriage). If they happen to be lucky or well connected, they manage to get additional funding through angel investors or venture capitalists. For an entrepreneur, the company is theirs. They’re leading the charge. They sink or swim, and the equity they invest is by and large in the form of sweat.
Corpreneurship is a bit different. With Corpreneurship, you’re an entrepreneur within a corporation. There tends to be a constant struggle of the corpreneur for more freedom within the corporation. It’s kind of like chaining a lion right in front of his jungle. Many of the risks are removed in corpreneurship. The corporation pays you a salary that is better than you would be getting if you had started the company yourself, and your access to resources to turn the product or idea into a reality is often much greater.
Both Entrepreneurs and Corpreneurs have their place. While both grow to be different through circumstance, neither is better than the other. I say all this because I decided I’d start sharing a bit more. I am an entrepreneur by and by. There’s a lot of small scale startups or projects I’ve been involved with. But for almost a year now I’ve been working as a corpreneur (not that this makes me an expert in anyway). The projects I’ve been involved with are all internet properties (social network types). Thankfully the company I work for (CastleBranch) has created an environment that feels much like a startup when it come to the more corpreneurial projects (probably because the company started as a startup itself).
I am going to start sharing my “notes”. What I’ve learned, the struggles, and the processes / steps I take when it comes to marketing, launching products, design, and so forth. In future posts I hope to see people adding their thoughts on the steps taken, etc. and will certainly encourage it as those posts come. If any of you have any particular area you want me to focus on or think about when writing the posts, please let me know.
