http://www.kauffman.org/Entrepreneurship/typecasting-the-entrepreneur.aspx
Nonprofit Entrepreneurs: Driven to Make a Difference
Nonprofit entrepreneurs are no less ambitious, passionate, or driven to make an impact than any other type of founder is. They simply measure their success in terms of social goals rather than profit.
Consider Irfan Alam, a twenty-seven-year-old from the Indian state of Bihar. He started the Sammaan Foundation to transform the lives of ten million rickshaw-pullers in India. Irfan got banks to finance rickshaw-pullers and designed rickshaws that can shelve newspapers, mineral water bottles, and other essentials for rickshaw passengers. These rickshaws carry ads, and the pullers get 50 percent of the ad revenue (the remainder goes to Sammaan). The pullers end up as owners after repaying the bank loan in installments. The effort started with one hundred rickshaws in 2007—today, more than 300,000 are involved.
Irfan doesn't take a salary, but he is as focused as any Silicon Valley entrepreneur is on scalability, asset leverage, return on investment, and growth metrics.
Regardless of the type of business, an entrepreneur is at the helm of each one. As a rule, all entrepreneurs demonstrate the same basic traits, often rooted in their DNA: risk tolerance; tenacity; a willingness to work extremely hard, and to do so while charting an uncertain, oft-unmapped path to the entrepreneurial success they seek. Entrepreneurs have courage in all types of startups, whether they're foregoing a paycheck to feed the family or borrowing from mom and dad to found the next Google. Understanding the different kinds of entrepreneurial businesses is critical for policymakers, educators, and—most of all—entrepreneurs. Knowing the differences at a startup's outset will strengthen the entrepreneur and help unleash the job creation, wealth creation, and social progress that entrepreneurship delivers.
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