The Curious Case of Internet Anonymity

Category : Technology
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Marcus Fitzgerald, the younger brother of NFL star WR Larry Fitzgerald apologized for writing disparaging remarks about QB Kurt Warner on his Twitter account.  LB Nick Barnett, LB Robert Henson and C Kevin Love have their own Twitter snafus.  Two Wisconsin Deputy Sheriffs burn a dummy wearing a co-worker’s uniform and post the video on Facebook, leading to their dismissal.  Employees at the National Science Foundation were fired for looking at porn at work for 331 days.  What do these incidents have in common?  They are all examples from the last week of people doing something stupid on the Internet and being SHOCKED when they are caught.

It seems like I hear about another story like this every day and I can’t seem to figure out why.  When the Internet first starting becoming popular in the late 90s, it was not uncommon to hear about people being fired for looking at porn at the office, buying illegal items over the Internet or trying to meet up with underage children.  I chalked that up to stupid people bringing their shady offline behavior to the Internet and not understanding that the Internet is basically public.   I figured that people did not realize that pretty much anyone could find out about what they were doing since the Internet was new.

Fast forward to 2009.  It’s been a decade since people started to become familiar with the Internet.  Everyone in the United States should have heard hundreds of these stories in the last ten years.  It wouldn’t surprise me if most Americans know at least one person personally who has done something stupid online that has led to adverse consequences.  Why does it continue to happen and why are people who slap videos up on YouTube shocked when they are discovered?  Why do people have a sense of anonymity and privacy with the Internet, when in reality, the Internet is probably the least private place in the world?

Why do underage drinkers post pictures of themselves on Facebook for the police or school officials to find when they would not post those pictures on their lockers?  Why do teens send nude pictures of themselves to their classmates over their cellphones or on Facebook when they would never give pass around a hard copy?  Why do grown men go to chat rooms and try to proposition children and go to meet them, even after the popularity of Chris Hansen’s To Catch A Predator, when they would never approach a child on the street (or even on the phone) with the same advances?  Why do people post rants on their Facebook or Twitter pages when they would never put the same information into a newspaper or say it to the person’s face?  Why do people do illegal things and post them on Youtube or Facebook video when they would never send them to their local news station?  Why do people post all sorts of things online that they would be mortified to do in real life?  Why are they shocked when they are caught?

I truly don’t understand it.  They have to know better.  They have to have seen examples of people getting into trouble for posting things online.  I cannot figure out why people have a sense of anonymity online when in reality it is the exact opposite.

I think about 20% of the people who do these types of things are just stupid.  They are equivalent to the guy who walks into the grocery store and waits for an employee to walk by, then shoves a frozen turkey under his coat.  They just don’t get it.  There is another 5-10% of people who just want to be “YouTube famous” and will post just about anything to be popular.  There is no helping these people.

My hypothesis for the rest of the population is that people who are posting these types of things online are generally alone, in their office or their home, and are lulled into a false sense of security.  They think that they are alone at home, so how can anyone else see what they are doing?  I don’t think that they are crying out for help or trying to get caught.  I think there is something about the isolation that is caused by computers and the internet that gives people the idea that they being private and careful, when in fact, it is the exact opposite.  They view the Internet as their own personal world, without regard to the rest of the people who happen to inhabit their virtual world as well.

I wonder if this is the height of the problem and history will look back at 2003-2009 as the crazy years when people were naive about the Internet, posting whatever they wanted and doing whatever they wanted, without regard to the consequences.  It could also go the other way, where everyone becomes desensitized to the stupid things people do online, but I do not think so.

Help me understand.  What’s your hypothesis as to why people slap pictures on Facebook and videos on YouTube that can get them in trouble? Why do so many people have a sense of anonymity online?  Will it continue?

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Are you Missing the Unintended Consequences?

Category : Political Science & Economics
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I attended a talk by Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, last night at the Kohl Center in Madison.  Pollan is one of my favorite writers and thinkers because he almost always has a new take on old problems that bring new and interesting points to the debate.  Pollan is most famous for In Defense of Food, an “eater’s manifesto” on how to eat well and forsake the “western diet” of processed foods and refined carbohydrates.  His book is interesting on many levels, but what struck me during the talk was how many of the problems that Americans have relating to their diet are unintended consequences of well-intentioned policies crafted by nutritionists, nutritional scientists, government bureaucrats and health-conscience consumers.

For example, Pollan talks about how throughout American history, there have been “blessed” and “evil” nutrients.  In the 1800s, protein was evil and John Harvey Kellogg led the charge against this scorage, leading many Americans to give up their traditional eggs, bacon, sausage and pancakes for boxed cereal, with the blessed carbohydrates.  Later, it was fat, leading to the creation of margarine and transfat to replace real butter and animal fat.  The Atkins phenomenon brought protein back because carbs were supposedly bad.  There have been many other examples of this throughout American history, but these are the easiest ones to see.  Each of these movements were started by people with good intentions who wanted to make Americans healthier.  At best, they did not work.  At worst, they made things worse.

The margarine and other plant fats that scientists created ended up being worse than the fats that they were replacing.  Pollan claimed that this switch led to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths from heart disease and other preventable diseases.  These deaths were an unintended consequence of food scientists and the government’s good intentions to help American live healthier lives.

Pollan’s talk led me to start thinking about other unintended consequences and how many people miss their impact in everyday life. I found some relating to our food, including some potential ones relating to Pollan’s “eater’s manifesto.”  Subsidizing the corn and soybean market after the USSR’s wheat crop failed in order to ensure that we never went hungry led to monocultures and a crash in farm prices, which led to fewer family farms.  It has led to America’s overproduction of cheap corn, which made high fructose corn syrup the cheapest and easiest sweetener to work with, leading to cheaper manufactured food and fatter, less healthy Americans.  Cheap subsidized corn and soybeans make it tough for farmers in Africa to compete and pull themselves out of poverty.  Now I don’t believe that each of these are straight cause and effect relationships, but its clear that these unintended consequences of trying to make sure that America’s food supply is secure have continued to ripple across the world since the 1970s.

Pollan’s manifesto advocates that we eat food, not too much, mostly plants and move away from packaged, processed “food like substances.”  This is a good goal, but he also advocates moving away from monoculture and large industrial farms.  The thinking is that we we have healthier plants, animals and humans if we diversify our food supply and stop growing huge amounts of corn and soybeans for use in just about everything.  Pollan believes that these types of changes could help solve global warming, the healthcare crisis and  potentially the current economic crisis.  It is clearly a noble goal, but what about the unintended consequences?

If farmers move away from high yielding monocultures, might we be at a larger risk of famine in the future as populations rise?  Could we lose jobs in the current food industry?  Could lower yields lead to higher food costs, much like how increased demand for corn based ethanol raised food prices worldwide, with most of the increased hurting the world’s poor?  Are there some other unintended consequences that Pollan’s way of thinking might bring about, much like the other big changes to our food supply brought to America’s dinner tables?

Personally, I think it is worth experimenting with Pollan’s ideas because I’m not sure we can do much worse than we are doing now, but it would be foolish to simply accept them and begin to implement them immediately.  I don’t believe that Pollan is calling for this, but I have not seen much research into the potential unintended consequences of his ideas. It reminds me a story I just came across the other day about tuna fishing.

In the early 1990s, groups like Greenpeace were outraged that tuna fishing companies were killing hundreds of dolphins with each catch.  Here’s how tuna fishing works

The main way that tuna is caught is through purse seines in the Eastern Tropical Pacific. Basically, after a large group of tuna is located, a miles-across purse seine net is closed around them via a group of small boats associated with a large factory ship.  It’s an effective way to catch large amounts of fish for not a lot of money.

This technique is pretty standard- the main variation lies in how the large group of tuna is located. There are basically three ways to do this.

1) Get lucky and happen to stumble across a large group of tuna visible from the surface in the middle of an enormous ocean. Obviously, this isn’t terribly practical.

2) Attract tuna using floating objects.  Stay tuned, we’ll come back to #2.

3) Follow dolphins, because dolphins in the Eastern Tropical Pacific are often associated with large schools of tuna. Dolphins are easy to follow because, unlike tuna, they have to come up for air.

For a long time, #3 was the most common way of catching tuna. The problem with this method was that by definition, dolphins are right there- and they get caught in the net as well. Despite the honest effort of many sailors to free dolphins (there is a long maritime tradition of respecting dolphins), by some estimates, around 500,000 dolphins a year were killed as a result of bycatch.

Sounds terrible, right?  500,000 dolphins EACH YEAR were killed as a result of this tuna fishing.  Groups like Greenpeace and others marshaled public support and got the rules changed, making dolphin following illegal.  People could not fish for tuna by following dolphins to big groups of tuna.  So what happened?

Tuna fishing fleets rapidly switched over to method #2, attracting tuna using floating objects.  If you put a log in the middle of the ocean, within hours it will be surrounded by fish. It may have something to do with the fact that many open ocean fish can go their entire lives without encountering a hard surface.

The floating objects now used by tuna fishing fleets are quite high tech- they have sonar and video cameras that allow the flagship to detect how many fish are near that object. Once there are enough, the purse seine comes and scoops them all up- and the floating object is redeployed.

The big problem with this method is that floating objects don’t only attract tuna. EVERYTHING is attracted to floating objects, including sea turtles, sharks, seabirds, billfish, and, yes, dolphins!

Well-intentioned groups like Greenpeace and others tried to help the dolphins by making fishing for tuna by using dolphins illegal, but the unintended consequences of their actions have created “The Ecological Disaster that is Dolphin Safe Tuna.” Here are some stats comparing the bycatch of both methods of fishing.  First, the floating log method, then the old, dolphin method:

Ten thousand sets of purse seine nets around immature tuna swimming under logs and other debris will cause the deaths of 25 dolphins; 130 million small tunas; 513,870 mahi mahi; 139,580 sharks; 118,660 wahoo; 30,050 rainbow runners; 12,680 other small fish; 6540 billfish; 2980 yellowtail; 200 other large fish; 1020 sea turtles; and 50 triggerfish.

By trying to help dolphins, groups like Greenpeace caused one of the worst marine ecological disasters of all time. Few other fisheries are as bad for groups like sharks and sea turtles as the purse seine fishery, and none are as large in scale.

“Ten thousand sets of purse seine nets around mature yellowfin swimming in association with dolphins, will cause the deaths of 4000 dolphins (0.04 percent of a population that replenishes itself at the rate of two to six percent per year); 70,000 small tunas; 100 mahi mahi; 3 other small fish; 520 billfish; 30 other large fish; and 100 sea turtles. No sharks, no wahoo, no rainbow runners, no yellowtail, and no triggerfish and dramatic reductions in all other species but dolphins.”

In other words… the only species that “dolphin safe” tuna is good for is dolphins!  The bycatch rate for EVERY OTHER species is lower when fishing dolphin-associated tuna vs. floating object associated tuna! The reason for this is obvious- floating objects attract everything nearby, while dolphins following tuna doesn’t attract any other species.

If you work out the math on this, you find that 1 dolphin saved costs 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks, and almost 1,200 small fish.

“Dolphin Safe Tuna” is one of the most egregious examples of unintended consequences that I have heard about in a long time.  I wonder if we may repeat similar mistakes with global warming (now called climate change), health care, taxes, the bank bailouts and our monsterous national debt.  We should at least try to look at the potential downsides and unintended consequences of our larger decision in all aspects of our lives – political, business and personal – so that we do not make another mistake like margarine or dolphin safe tuna.

Travelogue: Beata’s Trip

Category : Travel
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Note: This is a guest post by one of my best friends, Beata Rak.  After graduation, Beata moved to London, got a job as a tour guide and bartender at her local pub and has traveled around Europe and the Middle East.  After living in London, Beata is moving to Australia to continue her adventure.  Here are some of her favorite memories from Europe.

Today I fly out to Egypt and I begin my six weeks of travels. I have been living and working in London for about 8 months and wanted to save all my travels for the end of my trip, right before my big move to Australia. I am going to Egypt, Budapest, Berlin, Munich (OKTOBERFEST), Interlaken, Zurich, Paris, and Krakow. I haven’t written a single thing about where I have actually been or done while living in the UK, so as a personal record for myself and travel advice for all my friends, here is my UK wrap up.

St Patrick’s Day

This was celebrated, where else, but in Dublin. I have now been to Dublin twice and each visit was on St. Patrick’s Day. It is really fun. Two years ago the weather was horrible, rain, snow, sleet: everything in one day. All the hostels were booked so a group of 5 of us shared a hotel room by the airport. My best memory is of my friend walking around with a video camera asking the Irish what St. Patrick’s Day meant to them, and all replied “freedom from the English.” (This is not what St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of, but the Irish love to constantly emphasize their freedom from English rule.)

This year’s trip was a little different. I was smarter. I knew I didn’t need a hotel/hostel room. The airport would be enough. I flew in early St. Patrick’s Day morning, changed at the airport bathroom into a ridiculous green outfit and stored my bag at an airport locker. I then went to the city centre to meet my friend Carly who arrived by ferry. We then met my friend Meredith at her hostel, ate the hostel’s free breakfast (I’m sure the free breakfast was for the residents, but oh well!) and got ready for the parade. Parade was crowded and hard to see anything, but you were celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with the IRISH!!! How cool is that? It didn’t matter that all you saw was the top of a Lucky Charms float, and waited another 20 minutes for the next attraction. Everyone is dressed up in costumes and starts drinking at 10am. The best way to describe it: A mix between a Wisconsin vs. Michigan game at 11:00 and State street on Halloween. Insanity.

After the parade we went to a bar where we heard tradition Irish music. This was awesome. The Irish are so much fun. You just want to get up and join in their tradition folk dances. The end of the night was spent partying in TEMPLE Bar, which is basically an overpriced area of bars. If you go to Dublin, cross the river and you will notice a pint of Guinness is half the price. A fun memory involves my tourists. At the this point I had been a tour guide in London for about a month and a half and I had at least 10 people come up to me on the street in Dublin and yell “London tour guide!”  Then at about 3 am I took a bus to the airport, where I joined about 100 other fools dressed in green to board my 8am flight back to London.  I recommend that everyone experience this festivity even once.
CRUFTS, The World’s Largest Dog Show – Birmingham, England

My friend used to work at the Dog Kennel and was given free tickets to Crufts, the World’s Largest Dog Show, which is hosted in Birmingham every year. At this point I had adopted the philosophy of saying yes to pretty much everything, so when she invited me on a trip to Birmingham for the Crufts, I immediately said yes. This would definitely be interesting. And yes it was. We stayed with absolutely the nicest people. A friend of her’s played host for the weekend and he was amazing. I truly am impressed with British hospoitaly. Everyone is always offering a couch or bed for you to sleep on.

We saw a bit of Birmingham and I am not a fan of the city. The downtown area is clean and nice, but small. Everyone says that the bullring is awesome.  It was a nice shopping centre yes but I wouldn’t go back. I did enjoy our night out by the college. There is a university in the area and our host invited us to his friend’s gig. The band was awesome and the bar was cool. I was told Birmingham had good nightlife and this I am sure this is true. I enjoyed the one night we went out.

But now for CRUFTS, the highlight of the weekend! Dog people are weird. Very weird. There is this whole posh dog society that I had never known existed. And you know the phrase that dogs kind of look like their owners? SO TRUE. Big hairy people would have big hairy dogs. Petite ladies would own poodles, etc. The coolest part was seeing all the different varieties of dogs. Some dogs are so cute!!! But it broke my heart so see how expensive they were and they fact that people could pick a champion female dog and another champion male dog and pay money to have them mate so that they could have the best dog ever. The whole idea just seemed weird. Especially because there are so many stray dogs in kennels that need homes. I don’t understand why people would pay 15,000 pounds for a dog just because it is pure bred.  We watched a few competitions. They measure a dog’s tail, see how fast it can run, and do dog tricks like if they can find a hidden ball. It was all so odd. It really was just like on TV.  Crufts, an experience as I said, but not one I would recommend or repeat.
Stonehenge – Summer Solstice

This is without a doubt one of the coolest things I have done here. So Stonehenge is a site of these ancient rocks about an hour and half outside of London. Like the pyramids, no one is exactly sure how they got there. These huge stones are in the middle of nowhere and have been there for thousands of years. The stones are a huge tourists attraction, but they are not allowed to be touched. You can look at them from a distance. EXCEPT for the summer solstice. To celebrate the longest day of the year, or the shortest night a huge festival is held by the stones, and you can go right up to them, and touch them and everything. It is an ancient ritual to celebrate there and it is continued to this day. It was so cool, druids playing the drums, hippies wearing white, pagans dancing and us. A group of fools with lots of food and liquor. The idea is to stay up till sunrise. Partying from sunset to sunrise, or perhaps playing drums and dancing to the summer Gods who are about to bless us with a nice summer that will produce a good harvest. My friend and I succeeded to see the sunrise, but some people fell asleep. The experience is hard to describe. You are overwhelmed with the number of people, while at the same time shocked at how calm everyone is. There weren’t drunk fights, or people puking everywhere. Everyone was there to enjoy the experience. And a lot of people were there to truly celebrate the ritual. You can tell they had been doing it every summer. This is the only day of the year I would recommend going to Stonehenge. If you go any other time you will be disappointed, because it is only a pile of rocks. Don’t waste your money, or more importantly your time.

Oxford and Cambridge

So before I went to Oxford and Cambridge I sort of pictured two college campuses with tons of parties with hot posh British boys. Even though this is not how the universities are, they are absolutely beautiful and everyone must see these cities. First of all both schools do not have a campus. Both cities are filled with university buildings where the lectures are taught. These are the colleges, so there is the college of literature and law, etc. They are scattered all over the city and there isn’t any sort of quad or student centre really. The cities are gorgeous though. The nightlife is calm. People are out partying yes, but not like what you have on like Madison’s campus for example.

Oxford is beautiful. Gorgeous. We even saw boys playing croquet!! How cool is that. I went with three of my friends. We saw some boys playing and sat down to watch them. Then we started to take pictures. Then a huge crowd formed behind us. They were all taking pictures as well. Poor boys, they became a tourist attraction! A professor in Oxford wrote Alice in Wonderland and the story supposedly takes place there so we visited the Alice in Wonderland shop. There is also a very pretty river walk filled with trees and most of the buildings are covered in IVY. If you have a picture of Oxford in your head, it probably looks like that, except prettier.

Cambridge was very similar, but out of the two I think Cambridge is prettier. We stayed with a friend of a friend who is an absolutely amazing host. She is a tour guide on the river so she took us on a tour.  We went punting on the river and had our own personal guide. We learned a little bit of history about the very prestigious university and observed the many students who had just finished exams, rented their own boats and drunkenly were punting down the river. Then of course it started to rain, but this is England and it rains all the time, so what better way to end the tour than at the local pub. We had a laugh then parted our ways. Cambridge is breathtakingly gorgeous. Visit this city!

Stratford upon Avon, Cotswolds, Burford

One Sunday I decided to leave London and visit the Cotswolds which are cute villages outside of London. I took a day trip there with Viator tours. My group consisted of 7 people from Japan who did not speak a word of English, and American couple and a mother and daughter also from America. The group was interesting. As I did not speak any Japanese I hung out with the Americans. They were all nice, but at one point I was talking to the American mom and telling her how I was going to take a 6 week backpacking trip in a few months. She seemed very concerned, as I was a girl doing this alone. I told her it was perfectly safe and that I had done it before so I was not worried at all. When the sun was setting she came up to me and asked, “So Beata when it gets dark right about now, what do you do with your backpack? Do you just camp somewhere by the road and continue walking in the morning?

I thought she was kidding. But she wasn’t. She literally thought I was going to WALK from one European country to another with a backpack. And what is funny, the American couple thought the exact same thing. Oh Americans, sometimes we are so silly. I explained to them I’d be flying, taking buses and trains, and sleeping in hostels. Anyhow back to the villages. SO BEAUTIFUL!

We visited Burford, which I was very excited about because I talk about Burford on my tours. The villages are very pretty and picturesque.  There are rivers and lakes running through them, and they are very small. We visited about four different villages and you could walk each one in about 15 minutes. They are also very quiet, so a nice escape from London. On the trip I also visited Stratford Upon Avon. This is where Shakespeare was born. Super cool. I love Shakespeare and could not help but think of Mr. Bertenshaw when I was there. This teacher probably had one of the greatest impacts on my life. As I kept walking around the town all I kept thinking about was Mr. Bertenshaw jumping up and down and saying, J C. Juliet Capulet, Jesus Christ. I have to say though, learning about someone or something in school and then seeing it in real life is a pretty amazing feeling. We saw the building where Shakespeare was born, the house his daughter lived in and the church where he is buried. Definitely recommend a day trip from London.

Scotland

I loved Scotland and wish I had lived there for a bit. It is such a cool country and the people are amazing. I spent a week there and started in Edinburgh, which is a beautiful city. It looks like it comes straight out of a fairytale. I did the free walking tour there. When I do the tours in London I always hear about an amazing guide in Edinburgh, Grant, who wears a pink hat. So I went on his tour, and turns out he had been on my tour in London. What a small world. I also ran into a lot of people in my hostel, who had just been on my tour the week before. (Apparently I am a mini celebrity in the backpacking world!)

I then went on a 3 day haggis adventure tour with Busabout Tours. Recommend it very highly! This trip was awesome. I had a very outgoing guide Kyle who made the trip super fun. I met the three most amazing girls from Australia and the trip was ideal. We went to Loch ness and visited Nessie, the lock ness monster. Now, obviously I did not see her but we took a boat over Lock ness and watched all the sonar devices. Apparently the sonar will often get signals that are unexplained, and this is where we get the idea that there is something in the water. There are stories that villagers have seen a massive animal in the water but nobody really knows if it is true. The town where the loch is located is called Inverness and it small, cute and quaint. The Australian trio and I attempted to go out and meet some of the locals. This didn’t last very long as it turned into us and the bartender sitting at a table, then getting invited to a big party, which consisted of a total of 4 people. Instead we hung out with the group at the hostel bar and watched the most entertaining dance off I had seen in my life.

The next day was spent visiting the highlands. We went to the Isle of Sky. To say that the Scottish highlands are beautiful would be an insult. They are breath taking. I had no idea the extent of this beauty until I had seen it, a mixture of beautiful cliffs, lakes, and mountains. We also saw many castles, including the one from the movie, Maid of Honor, with Patrick Dempsey. We also saw lots of men in kilts playing bagpipes. I did not try haggis but I did eat a deep-fried mars bar, two of the famous Scotland dishes. The Mars Bar was yummy, but you really can’t eat more than half of it, it is sooo rich.

As for the haggis, as yummy as I hear it is, I really cannot bring myself to eat it. It is diced sheep liver, intestines, and heart etc, cooked in a sheep’s stomach. Apparently delicious, but not my cup of tea. I ended my trip to Scotland with a music festival, T in the Park. This was fun. I saw Kings of Leon, Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand, and the View. What is funny is that the night before we went out to a bar and met some guys who claimed to be in a band. I was like, yah right, sure. Every guy says that. Well the next day at the festival the band really was there. I felt like the biggest idiot, I missed an opportunity schmoozing the band to meet some of the headliners. Oh well…..next time.  Scotland is a country filled with a lot of pride to be Scottish, they blame everything on the English, just like the Irish. The entire trip was filled with stories of battles and of William Wallace, (Braveheart) we even saw his memorial, which is HUGE. I loved Scotland and for sure recommend going.

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Entrepreneurs Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Category : Entrepreneurship
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I’ve been writing a lot about entrepreneurship lately, focusing on how it is easier than many people think and how people should view getting involved in a startup as a viable alternative to getting into the job market, especially during college and in this economy.  One of the most common responses to these posts have been “I’d love to start my own business, but I don’t know the first thing about technology” or “running a big technology startup is too hard and I don’t want to move to the coasts.”  I want to clear up this common misconception.

There are all kinds of entrepreneurs.  They come in all shapes and sizes and start all sorts of industries.  I think everyone agrees that high flying Silicon Valley tech startups and cutting edge biotech companies are clearly founded by entrepreneurs, but there are so many more examples of entrepreneurship that many people overlook.  Founders of small businesses like gas stations or restaurants are entrepreneurs.  So are people who start non-profits, people who start bands, artists who sell their paintings and people who create custom designed t-shirts.  Self-employed consultants, programmers and graphic designers are entrepreneurs.  So are people who sell parking on football Saturdays and Sundays around the country.  The examples are endless.

Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist and the person who coined the word entrepreneur, defined an entrepreneur as someone who “undertakes an enterprise, acting as intermediary between capital and labour.”  I like his definition, but will add that an entrepreneur has to accept full responsibility for the endeavor’s success or failure.  All of these endeavors fit this definition.

Whenever I talk about entrepreneurship, I’m referring to all of these different ways to be an entrepreneur.  I think its critical for people who are thinking about starting something on their own to realize that they can be an entrepreneur and live the entrepreneurial lifestyle without raising hundreds of thousands of dollars, hiring huge amounts of employees and inventing something that will change the world.  These other types of entrepreneurship are just as important, if not more important, than many of the big high tech, high visibility startups that you hear about in most newspapers.  I think this distinction is really important and try to break it down whenever I talk with potential entrepreneurs.