The Nontrepreneur: Not In It for the Money. I Want to Change the World.

Nick Douglas did an excellent piece over at Valleywag a couple weeks' back, which I've been meaning to blog. It's all about the death of the serial entrepreneur. Nick believes:

The new archetypal business creator is not that interested in business at all. Unlike Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page with their single grand vision, or the mercenary team who built Myspace for the money, founding a company is just one way the nontrepreneur fulfills a desire to improve the world.

Indeed,

The nontrepreneur changes the world a dozen ways at a time; a business is just one.

In this insightful post (where Nick reveals his true aspiration: turning it into a book), he illustrates his point using one Mr. Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit. His is an incredibly interesting story, very well told by Nick:

Swartz was born in 1986. And then he sold a popular social news company for millions of dollars. But he's not an entrepreneur. Swartz helped build the RSS content syndication technology, ran for a seat on the board that oversees Wikipedia, and meanwhile learned a good deal about news, politics, Noam Chomsky, criticism of modern culture, and enough other knowledge to fill a Borders non-fiction section.

I highly recommend reading both this, and Philipp Lenssen's post to learn a bit more about Aaron, and what a nontrepreneur looks like.

Thanks to my Open Coffee Club friend James Britt, for reminding me to blog about this via his own post, in which he creatively offers variations on the Nontrepreneur:

Salontrepreneur:

Operates out of some hip, literary hangout

Gonetrepreneur:

Ex-founder

Black Swantrepreneur:

Has a start-up that depends on some highly unexpected event

Don Juantrepreneur

No business plan, but still charms women into providing funding