I think most people would agree that any definition of entrepreneur has to involve some angle about risks and unknowns juxtaposed with rewards.

And in case you didn’t know, the French word Entreprendre, which means “to undertake”, is the root to Entrepreneur.

So in the spirit of risks and unknowns and undertaking–and in the spirit of visiting the country that provided the root to one of the words of the title of this blog–Amy and I are taking Kaitlin (4) and Alex (2) to Paris for Thanksgiving.

Risks? Check. Unknowns? Check. The French? Check. Rewards? I’ll tell you in about 8 days.

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Subscribe to my RSS feed and find out if I can survive what might quite possibly be a hair-brained plan to escape the country over the holidays.

(Source and More info on the #’s behind this)

No matter what, if Detroit doesn’t hit the core issue head on, they’re done, it’s just a matter of time. Any entrepreneur worth his salt can tell you that people/employees are by far your largest expense. And if, because of unions, your largest expense costs you 50% more than your competitor per unit, you’re off the reservation if you think you can defend that long term. It’s only a matter of time. The unions and Detroit have both painted themselves into a corner. I’ll predict it here, unless they bust them up, or drastically renegotiate the commitments (READ: let them go bankrupt so that external process can MANDATE change to the unions), they will not survive. Might drag it out another 10 years, or 20 years, or even longer. But they’ll be done.

I love unions. Next business I do is going to be unionized labor or bust!

PS - is anyone else bothered by the fact that people who operate computerized equipment (basically the 2008 version of a wrench) make so much damn money?

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Yep, that video was my idea. I think I even wrote the script for it. Good old days.

Here’s the background on it:

When we started BurlyZone (what ultimately became GearTrade.com) in 2000, we decided to do a contest with some video for the summer 2000 Outdoor Retailer show in Salt Lake City as a way to drive traffic to our booth.

We mailed out floppy disks with a teaser on it, and then had planned to show this movie at our booth, and then have an online component to follow it up to close out the story (we never finished that since we ran out of time). We literally saw video this minutes before we headed to the show and needless to say, we were even baffled by the nutty animation.

On the first day of the show, we showed this to one of our advisors that had a long history in the outdoor industry, and he said, here’s the deal: If you’re going to show this to anyone else, I don’t know who you guys are. If you agree to never show it at the booth or ever again, I’ll refer people over to you and help you out.

We never showed it and it’s a funny reminder of first time entrepreneurs going down a misguided road and then running off that road with the implementation of the project. Funny stuff.

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Scientists at Cambridge University have done some research where they found entrepreneurs running high-technology companies exhibit more “highly adaptive risk-taking behavior” and that this can result in far more positive results during stressful business situations.

Not that much of a revelation.

It also suggested that as risk-taking and quick decision-making were linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, there is a possibility that drugs could be developed that the naturally risk-adverse could take.

Interesting.

Professor Barbara Sahakian, lead author of the research, said the findings “raise the question of whether one could enhance entrepreneurship pharmacologically”.

More interesting.

My only question to the mad scientists out there: Can you make me a pill to turn my risk-taking and quick decision-making nature off?

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Global Entrepreneurship Week is next week.

Its objectives are to Inspire, Connect, Mentor, and Engage. (About Global Entrepreneurship Week)

Grow Utah Ventures is the regional sponsor of the event, and Utah has some events scheduled next Thursday Nov 20th as part of GEWUtah at the South Towne Expo Center in Sandy.

I’m participating on a panel, and I think events like this are so incrediblely valualbe for entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs.

Hope to see you there at GEWUtah.