Engineer vs. Entreprenuer

What is the difference between an Engineer and an Entrepreneur? I can't speak about other engineering fields, however, in software engineering the difference is worth pondering over.

A smart engineer builds a great product to solve a technical problem, gifts the product away to the open-source community for the greater good, gets recognition in the technical community for the effort, and then goes back to being a salaried employee at a company.

A smart entrepreneur on the other hand, hires smart engineers to build a product to solve a consumer problem by using the technological advancements made by the open-source community, gets recognition among the masses, either sells the company or takes it public, becoming a millionaire or possibly a billionaire in the process.

Case in point - Doug Cutting developed Hadoop, a great distributed computing framework, gifted it to the open-source community, gained respect in the technical community, and went back to being a salaried employee. Whereas, Mark Zuckerberg built facebook by using Hadoop to gain massive scalability and reliability, gained world-wide recognition by building the largest social network, and became a billionaire after facebook went public.

Moral of the story: Become an Engineer, but think like an Entrepreneur!

The iConic Entrepreneur: Steve Jobs

People who love Apple products have grown to admire Steve Jobs as a great visionary and entrepreneur. Those who are intrigued by Steve's life and his numerous contributions should definitely read his book: "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson. Steve Jobs did not have the perfect life, and perhaps this is why he strived to achieve perfection in his work by making products that are simple and intuitive. Steve was one of the rare individuals who understood that engineering is not just a science, it is an art as well. So, what makes Steve Jobs such a great entrepreneur? The first thing that comes to mind when we think of great entrepreneurs is that they are "great visionaries". However, having a vision is not everything, execution and timing are just as important. I read Bill Gates's book - "The Road Ahead" - in the nineties. In the book, Gates predicts that the web would evolve into an Information Superhighway and it would be accessible by a small device that is the size of our wallet. This wallet-sized device would cater to all our computing and communication needs. Even with Gates' vision, Microsoft never came up with such a product. It was Apple that launched the iPhone, which does what Gates had predicted. Where Apple succeeded - when Microsoft failed - was in the execution and timing. Under Steve's leadership, Apple executed flawlessly to deliver such a great product. With the IT world gravitating towards Cloud Computing (and SaaS), the timing could not be better. So in a grand scheme of things, execution and timing go hand-in-hand with a great vision. Steve Jobs had all three: great vision, execution and timing. This is why Steve Jobs is the iConic entrepreneur of our generation.