4 ms·

"I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople." What exactly are "real businesspeople"?

• staunch 17y ago
  He pretty much says what he means: "I am not sure these guys are real businesspeople. They need to stop behaving like children." -- he means "old businesspeople". Ya'know "professional" people. People who fit in the clip-art image of a businessperson.
• blasdel 17y ago
  Parsed charitably, he means that they aren't serial businesspeople — they ["don't want to", "won't", "can't"] start new independent businesses. It's a variant of the lifestyle business epithet.
  • neilc 17y ago
    That sounds like a "serial entrepreneur", not a serial businessperson: a "business person" doesn't necessarily ever start a new business, let alone a string of them.
    • blasdel 17y ago
      His point is more that they're really Web Developers, not businesspeople. That their expertise is from direct experiential practice with an extremely narrow type of software business. He's a business school type, so this rankles. His whole world view is based on broadly applicable business practices, grounded in theory and hypothesis, backed up with data. His kind of "business person" doesn't even necessarily start one business, even if they might see opportunities everywhere — they get brought in as management. But if they start one, they're probably going to start more.
• mikeryan 17y ago
  I thought the same. It seems to me that a "business person" is someone who runs a business. A Good "business person" runs a successful business and a bad one runs an unsuccessful one. A lot can be said about the way 37 signals self promotes but its hard to deny their success. Personally I learned a long time ago that there's no business book that can tell me how to run my business. You read some good, some bad and if you're lucky find a few good pearls of wisdom along the way.