SubscribePassion for Your Venture, Is this a good thing?
Passion is often cited as an essential quality for an entrepreneur relative to the venture that he or she is pursuing. Certainly, long hours, risk and sacrifice – these must be balanced out by some internal driver. Successful entrepreneurs are often quoted as saying that they would have not succeeded had they not had extreme passion for the venture. But it's easy to just look at the positive side of this.
How many entrepreneurs have meshed their vocation with their avocation? Career ski bums who invent a new ski binding; the surfer who develops a new board material, the fisherman who develops a new leader. I've seen each of these – fail. Very few entrepreneurs are able to combine an activity they love with an opportunity to grow a real business. Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia; David Jacobs, Spyder; Howard Head (Head Ski and the modern era of Skiing); Jake Burton (Snowboard and the entire Snowboard industry) are a few of a small group who succeeded to varying degrees.
This is why investors often ask entrepreneurs what drives them. If it's a passion for the product, that's a concern that needs to be probed. If it's a passion for making money then it's onto the next question. I've made this mistake once – investing in an entrepreneur passionate about the product. Wins to him were around seeing people wear the product and connect with the brand. Cash was a means to get more people in the product and that's different then growing a business.