When Is it OK to Call Yourself an Entrepreneur?

“Here’s my business card,” he said. Normally someone handing me a business card wouldn’t be strange. But this felt different because the person handing me the card was less than half my age and still in high school.

I was meeting with a prospective Duke student visiting campus. This happens from time to time — high schooler students will stop by my office for a few minutes to meet with someone who teaches classes they’re interested in. I suspect they believe I’ve got some sort of magical ability to put their name on a secret, high priority admissions list. I don’t actually have that magical ability, but it’s nice to feel wanted.

A handful of the high schoolers I’ve met in this way have handed me their resumes. I suppose that’s reasonable. Resumes provide a bit more context about who the students are and what they’ve done. However, the meeting I’m about to describe sticks out in my mind because it was the first time a high schooler had given me a business card. I glanced down to read it. In the space on the business card typically reserved for the person’s job title, it said: “entrepreneur.”

“I see you’re an entrepreneur,” I said. “How do you know?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. So I tried to assure him it was an earnest and genuine question. I wasn’t trying to be patronizing.

“Let me explain,” I said. “A few days ago, I had a guest speaker in one of my entrepreneurship courses. He’s had two successful exits and is in the middle of what seems likely to be his third. At one point during the visit, one of my students asked him, ‘When did you know you wanted to become an entrepreneur?’ What do you think he answered?”

The high schooler shrugged and said, “I guess probably after he sold his first company.”

“That’s a good guess, but no,” I replied. “Actually, he told us, ‘I don’t really consider myself an entrepreneur.’ That seems strange, right? How could he not consider himself an entrepreneur?”

“Of course he’s an entrepreneur,” the high schooler argued. “He’s sold his company for millions of dollars. That’s like the text-book definition of entrepreneur.”

“Is it?” I asked. “Have you ever looked up the definition for ‘entrepreneur’?”

“No,” he admitted. “I guess I haven’t.”

“That’s fine,” I assured him. “It wouldn’t matter if you had. Just because a book defines an entrepreneur one way doesn’t mean that’s the way you have to define it. For me, the more important question is: if a person who, by all standard measures of entrepreneurship should be considered a successful entrepreneur, hesitates to call himself an entrepreneur, how could you know you’re an entrepreneur? And what makes you so sure you’re an entrepreneur that you’ve printed it on a business card?”

The high schooler thought for a few moments, “I don’t know,” he sighed. “When did you know you were an entrepreneur?”

I hesitated. “Honestly,” I replied after a long pause, “I have no idea. Maybe I’m not.”

I hadn’t expected to have my own question turned back on me. Even worse, I couldn’t answer him. When do you really know you’re an entrepreneur? And, perhaps as importantly, when is it OK to call yourself an entrepreneur?

What makes someone an entrepreneur?

When I was in college, we didn’t have entrepreneurship classes. I’m not sure if I’d ever heard the word “entrepreneur.” If I had, would I have called myself one? I don’t think so. However, in retrospect, I was certainly entrepreneurial.

Although I didn’t incorporate my first official company until a few years after college, I was running a business-like entity from my dorm room. I would scour eBay for Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs (early smartphone-like gadgets) with unusually low “Buy it Now” prices. I’d have them shipped to my dorm, and then I’d re-sell them for a few bucks more than what I’d paid.

Those were the early days of eBay. I’m not sure how many people were doing the same thing as me back then, but lots of people do it now. It’s called an arbitrage business, and it’s common practice on both eBay and Amazon. Some people even make decent livings from it.

In contrast, my version of eBay arbitrage certainly wasn’t a good way to get rich. The margins were too low. But, for a college kid who had all his expenses otherwise covered, the extra income (and constant supply of new gadgets) was pretty cool. Did it also make me an “entrepreneur”?

Soon after college, I incorporated and launched two businesses. Both failed and I made less money than I’d made flipping electronic gadgets on eBay. But was I an entrepreneur because I had legal documents proving I’d incorporated businesses even if they didn’t make money?

Since then, I’ve run multiple venture-backed tech companies. Those companies have generated plenty of revenue but — because we were focused on scaling — they were technically never profitable since we dumped all the money back into them. In that sense, my eBay arbitrage business still had bigger profits. However, I raised lots of venture capital for my tech companies. Did I become an entrepreneur because I raised money from outside investors?

Conversely, nearly 20 years after college, I teach entrepreneurship courses as part of a credential-conferring entrepreneurship program at a university. The vast majority of my students haven’t launched companies. However, they all complete the program and earned credentials in entrepreneurship. Do students who complete some sort of academic degree program in entrepreneurship get to call themselves entrepreneurs? After all, students who graduate with engineering degrees call themselves engineers. What’s the difference between those students and entrepreneurship students?

How to become an entrepreneur

It's been nearly two years since I met that high schooler with "entrepreneur" printed on his business card, and his question -- When did you know you were an entrepreneur? -- is still bugging me. The more I think about it, the more I find myself agreeing with the answer given by my guest speaker: “I don’t really consider myself an entrepreneur.”

If I’m being honest, few things in my career make me more uncomfortable than calling myself an entrepreneur. In fact, the only time I use the phrase to describe myself is when I need a shorthand way of sharing my qualifications for teaching entrepreneurship classes or writing articles like the one you’re reading. For example, I might describe myself as a “serial entrepreneur” in an online bio. It’s a way of saying, “I’ve started lots of companies and am speaking/writing from a place of experience.” After all, who'd want entrepreneurship advice from someone with no entrepreneurship experience? However, if you and I were to meet on the street and you asked what I do for a living, I would never say, “I’m an entrepreneur.”

In my experience, this seems to be true of all the entrepreneurs I know. Rather, it’s true of all the people I’d call entrepreneurs. None of the best entrepreneurs I’ve met walk around with their chests puffed out saying, “I’m an entrepreneur.” They don’t wear the term like it’s a symbol of authority in the same way sheriffs wear their badges and doctors wear white coats and judges wear robes.

Instead of calling themselves entrepreneurs, real entrepreneurs seem to be given the title by people who know them. In other words, they don’t call themselves entrepreneurs. We call them entrepreneurs when we see them doing entrepreneurial things.

So maybe that’s how you become an entrepreneur. It’s not something you decide to become on your own. And it’s never something you call yourself. Instead, you keep working hard and pursuing your business ventures, and maybe one day someone else decides to call you an entrepreneur.

If and when that day comes, you’ll probably be too busy working on your venture to care. And I suspect guessing you’ll be too busy to put it on a business card.

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Aaron Dinin teaches entrepreneurship at Duke University. A version of this article originally appeared on Medium, where he frequently posts about startups, sales, and marketing. For more from Aaron, you can also follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his awesome podcast, Web Masters.