Why Entrepoorneur?

What the hell is "entrepoorneur"? Is it something I made up? I honestly don't recall exactly how I came up with this, but this was something I came up with when I thought of my background and how I currently am. I did read some other people mention "entrepoorneur" being a "failed" entrepreneur, but I picked this name for a different reason. I have not had the full experience of starting a company. I've been poor since I've grown up, and this has kept my from doing exactly what I like. I've finally found a medium - of wanting to do what I want and also not risking losing all of my money.

If you've read my previous post, and you didn't realize - I spent a year and a half majoring in Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas. These one and a half years was a total waste of time - I took classes, paid for classes, but failed basically everything. After switching to Computer Science, I was in school for I believe 3 years. Throughout the 5 years at the University of Texas, my parents couldn't support me, so I had taken student loans for everything for all 5 years. That means loans for tuition, loans for food, loans for rent, and anything else that could cost money attending college. I received roughly $20k/year for tuition and some years an extra $5k for the years I took summer classes. That means graduating college, I had roughly $100k of student loans. Now that's quite a bit of a loan graduating from college wanting to start a company, and that's basically how I came up with the term "entrepoorneur".

Now let's talk about this happy medium I've recently found. After participating in 3 Day Startup, I definitely wanted to start up a company. What kind of company did I have in mind? A game changer - an idea that would get millions of dollars of backing from huge VC firms; an idea that would affect everyones' life; a company that would get huge and get bought out by some other big company - or go public or something... What would I have to do for that? I would most likely have to quit my day job, and my idea would have to be my day job. That sounds like a great idea, except for the fact that I owe about $100k from my college years... How is this going to work? For the longest time, I had brainstormed what I could do. "Let's try bankruptcy" - err... that doesn't seem to get rid of my student loans.... "How about leaving the states and never coming back" - that's another bad idea as I have nowhere else I would rather be than Austin, Texas right now.... My student loans felt like chains holding me down from what I wanted to do. I had been offered CTO position by a friend who had been working on his idea, but I had to kindly decline because of these damned student loans. After failing to think of what I could do - I just gave up the idea briefly. I still had the urge deep down that I wanted to start my company, but I was just going to have to wait until I pay off all of my student loans first. This is where my coworker came in. He had started his own company, and he does it as a side business. He has his day job, but at night and in the mornings before work, he works on his side company. I don't think I had ever thought of creating a self funded startup. My mind was so set on creating a company backed by a VC, that I had forgotten the option of self funding a company. This way - I would get the best of both worlds. I would be able to pay off my student loans, as I work on creating a company on the side. As I talked to my coworker, I had a lot of questions and thoughts. How exactly would I "bootstrap" a company? How do I even start? Where do I start? Luckily enough, my coworker agreed on mentoring me in exchange for me helping develop and sell one of his ideas.

That's basically how I ended up where I'm at now and how I came up with the name entrepoorneur for my blog. Hopefully that changes one day, but for now, this is me.