Why be an entrepreneur?

There are primarily two reasons I can think of for taking up entrepreneurship:

1. Entrepreneurship as an end in itself: taking it up for the freedom, control and other benefits it offers.
2. Entrepreneurship as a means to some other end: taking it up because it is the most suitable way to get something done.

My original interest in entrepreneurship was for the former reason — I wanted to be able to decide for myself what I wanted to work on — but I've been drifting towards the second ever since. The time has come to ask the question again:

What does Seacrow Labs do?

I started with an interest in information management, in the areas between taking data out of a database and presenting it to the user — the machine APIs and human interface (vs. the guts of a database) — but that is just an interest, not a task at hand.

I've evaluated several ideas in the last two months and while some are very interesting, none of them are suitable for me as an individual to take up. All of them require either the backing of an established organisation, or a team and significant funding. I have two options to choose from now:

1. Insist on my independence and dump the idea(s).
2. Make the idea my focus and do whatever it takes to make it a reality.

Pragmatism asks that I take option 2. I'm moving to Synapse in Goa tomorrow evening to spend three months there working on my ideas and picking up necessary skills for their execution. If an idea seems executable only from within another organisation that is what I will do. The Seacrow Labs project is on pause indefinitely. I will however continue to update this journal as needed, so don't tune out already.

For the sake of explaining the gap in my resumé, I will also be working on a media server for Synapse — a repository of documents, images, audio files and videos, with a categorisation engine, search engine, and user interface integrated into the desktop environment (Windows first; X11 only if it is necessary).

The several thousands of rupees I've invested in degrading and non-degrading assets for my working environment will continue to serve me during this period. The portable items go with me to Goa; the rest await my return.