Types of Entrepreneurs

Types of entrepreneurs are the different ways people start and run businesses: alone as a solopreneur, with partners as cofounders, one company after another as a serial entrepreneur, or several at once as a multipreneur. Other classifications describe the goal: small business, scalable startup, social venture, corporate venture or a business bought rather than built.

Every page on this site follows the same route of nine milestones, from deciding why to start to deciding whether to sell. That route does not change. What changes is the person walking it. A solo freelancer and a three-person venture-backed team both have to validate an idea and find customers, but the way they do it, the risks they carry and the moment they should move on are different. This pillar is the second axis of the site: it explains the main types, how to tell which one you are, and how each one bends the route.

Why the type matters more than the label

Most lists of entrepreneur types sort people by personality or by ambition. Those labels are easy to read and hard to use: they do not tell you what to do next week.

The classification that helps with decisions is structural. How many people share the decisions? How many businesses are you running? Have you done this before? Those three questions shape almost every choice on the route: how much money you need saved, how fast you can validate, who sells, how you price, when you can afford to quit, and what you can sell at the end.

In the interviews I do with indie founders, a common source of bad advice is a mismatch of type. A solo founder follows a playbook written for a funded team and burns out trying to do the work of five people. A team copies a solo founder’s slow, profitable path and runs out of patience before it pays. Neither playbook was wrong. It was written for someone else.

The four working types

The site covers four types in depth, each with its own page. They are not exclusive: a serial entrepreneur can work alone, and a multipreneur can have a cofounder in one business and none in another. Think of them as the situations you will be in, not boxes you belong to.

Type	What it means	What changes most on the route	Read more
Solopreneur	One person owns and runs the business, usually with no employees	Time and attention are the scarcest resources, so scope and pricing decide everything	What Is a Solopreneur?
Cofounder	Two or more people start and own the business together	Equity, roles and conflict become decisions in their own right	What Is a Cofounder?
Serial entrepreneur	Starts one business after another, usually after selling or closing the last	Experience speeds up validation, but past success can create blind spots	What Is a Serial Entrepreneur?
Multipreneur	Runs several businesses at the same time	Focus and allocation of time between businesses become the main problem	How to Manage Multiple Businesses

The solopreneur

Merriam-Webster defines a solopreneur as someone who organizes, manages and takes on the risk of a business without a partner, and dates the first known use of the word to 1992. In practice it also usually means no employees: the solopreneur may use contractors and software, but the business is one person deep.

This is the most common way to run a business in the United States. The Census Bureau counted 29.8 million nonemployer businesses in 2022, with $1.7 trillion in receipts, out of 35.7 million businesses in total. In other words, roughly five in six US businesses have no paid employees. The solopreneur page covers what that means for each milestone, from how to pick an idea one person can deliver to what you can actually sell when the business depends on you.

The cofounder

A cofounder shares ownership and the founding work with at least one other person. The upside is obvious: more skills, more hours, someone to argue with before the market does. The cost is less obvious. Noam Wasserman, who studied about 6,000 startups and 16,000 founders, found that people problems were behind 65% of the failures of high-potential startups in his data. That figure covers more than cofounder fights, but cofounder relationships are a large part of it. The cofounder page covers when a partner helps, when one hurts, how to find one and how to split equity.

The serial entrepreneur

A serial entrepreneur starts businesses one after another. The evidence that experience helps is real but narrower than people assume. A study of venture-backed founders by Paul Gompers, Anna Kovner, Josh Lerner and David Scharfstein, published in 2010, found that founders whose previous venture had succeeded had a 30% chance of success with the next one, against 20% for founders whose previous venture had failed and 18% for first-time founders. Success was defined as going public, and the sample was venture-backed companies, so it says little about small or bootstrapped businesses. The serial entrepreneur page covers what experience changes and what it does not.

The multipreneur

A multipreneur runs more than one business at the same time. Greg Isenberg, writing about the term in a 2023 essay, describes the idea as a company that creates companies: several products per year, each with a small team, instead of one all-or-nothing bet. Many people do it for simpler reasons: a service business that funds a product, or a portfolio of small sites. The page on how to manage multiple businesses covers how to divide time, money and attention, and when a second business is really a distraction from the first.

Other common classifications

Business schools, governments and investors use other classifications. They answer a different question: not how you work, but what the business is for and how it is funded. They combine with the four working types. You can be a solopreneur running a small business, or a cofounder of a scalable startup.

Classification	What defines it	Typical funding	Where it shows up on the route
Small business	Supports the owner and family, usually without a plan to become large	Savings, bank or SBA loans, family	Pricing and steady customers matter more than growth rate
Scalable startup	Built from day one to grow very large and reach an exit	Venture capital	Validation means finding a repeatable model fast
Social entrepreneur	Built mainly to solve a social problem	Nonprofit, for-profit or hybrid	Success is measured partly outside revenue
Intrapreneur (corporate)	Builds a new venture inside an existing company	The employer	No personal capital at risk, but less ownership
Acquisition entrepreneur	Buys an existing business instead of starting one	Investors, loans, seller financing	Skips idea and validation, starts at growth

Small business and scalable startup

Steve Blank separated these in a 2011 essay on why governments misread startups. A small business, in his description, is run to support a family, without a plan to grow large, and is funded by savings, loans and relatives: the plumber, the grocer, the consultant. A scalable startup is designed from the start to become very large, searches for a repeatable business model and usually raises venture capital. Blank also listed lifestyle businesses run around a personal passion, buyable startups built to be sold to a larger company, large companies innovating internally, and social ventures.

The research supports the distinction. Erik Hurst and Benjamin Pugsley found in a 2011 NBER paper that most small business owners have little interest in growing large or introducing new products, and that non-financial reasons, such as being your own boss and flexible hours, weigh heavily in the decision to start. That is not a lack of ambition. It is a different goal, and it calls for different decisions at every milestone. For the official US definition, the SBA Office of Advocacy counts an independent business with fewer than 500 employees as small, which covers 99.9% of US businesses.

Social entrepreneur

Roger Martin and Sally Osberg, writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2007, described social entrepreneurship as spotting a social problem, finding an opportunity to solve it, and making a broad effort to solve it at scale. At least one critic argued at the time that the definition leaned too far toward large-scale change and leaves out the many social entrepreneurs who work locally. On this site, social ventures follow the same nine milestones. The difference is that “will people pay for it” sometimes becomes “who pays for it”, because the user and the payer are not always the same person.

Intrapreneur

Gifford Pinchot III and Elizabeth Pinchot coined the term intrapreneur in a 1978 paper on entrepreneurship inside corporations, and expanded it in their 1985 book Intrapreneuring. An intrapreneur builds something new inside an employer, with the company’s money and the company’s ownership. Many founders spend a few years in this role before leaving, and it is a useful way to test whether you like building from zero before you quit your job.

Acquisition entrepreneur

Some entrepreneurs buy instead of build. The best documented version is the search fund, which Stanford describes as a model in which an entrepreneur raises capital to find, buy and run a private company. Stanford’s 2026 study has tracked more than 850 search funds in the US and Canada since 1996. About 58% of them completed an acquisition, typically after around 20 months of searching, and the median purchase price in 2024 and 2025 was $16 million. Smaller acquisitions, such as buying a newsletter, a content site or a small software product, follow the same logic at a scale one person can finance. An acquisition entrepreneur skips the idea and validation milestones and starts at growth, but takes on a different risk: paying for a business whose numbers or customers are not what they seemed.

How each type bends the route

The nine milestones stay in the same order for everyone. This is where the types diverge most.

1. Why start a business. Solopreneurs and small business owners tend to start for autonomy and income. Scalable startup founders more often start for the size of the outcome. Knowing which applies to you prevents years of chasing someone else’s goal. See why start a business.
2. Finding an idea. A solopreneur needs an idea one person can deliver. A team can take on a bigger problem. A serial entrepreneur usually already has an unfair advantage in a market.
3. Quitting your job. Solo founders carry all the income risk, so savings matter more. Cofounders can stagger who quits first.
4. Validation. Experience shortens it. Acquisition skips it, but replaces it with due diligence.
5. First customers. Someone has to sell. In a solo business it is you. In a team, deciding who sells is one of the first real role decisions.
6. Pricing. Solopreneurs are limited by hours, so underpricing hurts them faster than anyone.
7. Pivot, push on or quit. Cofounders have to agree. Multipreneurs have the option to stop one business and keep the rest.
8. Growth. For a solopreneur, growth often means a change of type: the first hire turns a solo business into a small company.
9. Selling. A business that depends on one person is harder to sell. Teams and systems make a business transferable.

Common mistakes

• Choosing a type by identity instead of by circumstances. “I am a solopreneur” can become a reason to avoid hiring when the business clearly needs it. The type should follow the business, not the other way around.
• Using advice written for a different type. Venture advice about raising money and growing fast is wrong for most small businesses, and small business advice about steady profit is wrong for a startup that needs to grow before its money runs out.
• Starting a second business to escape the first. Running several businesses works when each one runs without daily attention. Starting a new one because the current one is hard usually leaves two half-finished businesses.
• Assuming experience transfers automatically. The research on serial founders shows an advantage, but it is smaller than the confidence it tends to produce, and it was measured in one narrow kind of company.

How to know which type you are

Answer three questions honestly. Who makes the final decision when you disagree with yourself at 11 p.m.? If it is only you, you are working solo, even with contractors. How many businesses need you this month? If more than one, you are a multipreneur, whether or not you use the word. Is this your first business? If not, the serial entrepreneur page will help you separate what your experience really tells you from what it only feels like it tells you.

Then accept that the answer will change. The type describes where you are now, and the useful move is to check, at each milestone, whether your decisions still fit it.

Where this sits on the route

Types of Entrepreneurs is not a step after milestone 9. It runs alongside the whole route. If you have just read about whether to sell your business, the serial entrepreneur and multipreneur pages cover what usually comes next. If you are at the start, go back to milestone 1, Why Start a Business?, and read the route with your type in mind.