Entrepreneurship -- it’s in your blood
By "Your Business" anchor JJ Ramberg:
This week my father came to the taping of the show. He's an entrepreneur and an investor. My mother was an entrepreneur. Both of their fathers were entrepreneurs. My brother is one too. And so am I.
Clearly, there's something in our blood.
Having my father in the green room before the show sparked the conversation of why the desire to start a business gets passed down through the generations.
One of the panelists on this week's show, Divya Gugnani, said her father was an entrepreneur and she grew up thinking that she wanted nothing to do with starting her own company. The uncertainty of living with -- as she put it -- the wealth of the world one day and nothing the next seemed unappealing for her own career.
She said she remembers travelling around when everything was great with her dad's work, and then watching him use his credit cards to make payroll when it wasn't, and it was scary.
So instead of going the entrepreneur route she became an investor, joining a venture capital company. Cut to a few years later and, you guessed it, Divya had left her VC company and its steady paycheck to start her own company called "Behind the Burner."
She said she couldn't help it.
"There is a point when you wake up and all you want to do is work on your company, and so that's what I had to do," she told us.
All of the entrepreneurs in the room nodded in agreement.
Clearly, entrepreneurship is not for everyone. I have a good friend who left his high-profile advertising job to start a company and a mere six months later returned to the agency. As he joked, "Nobody told me I was going to have to take out my own trash."
As for Divya, her father thinks she's insane. She says, she is. She says you have to be. Who else but an insane person would take the risk? But if the passion is there you can’t deny it, and she says she loves what she's doing.
What do you think?
What does it take to become an entrepreneur?
