Dr. Jeff Cornwall discusses a recent survey of small businesspeople on his Entrepreneurial Mind blog. According to the survey, most small business owners are motivated by the desire to be their own boss, and find entrepreneurship much more fulfilling and financially rewarding than they expected. The respondents also reported that entrepreneurship was much more difficult than they had expected, due primarily to the longer hours entrepreneurs spend working.

Read the article, which includes a link to the survey and a quiz that assesses your entrepreneurial savvy.

The Kauffman Foundation published the findings from their study, “Are Women Entrepreneurs Different From Men?” The researchers asked successful, high growth male and female entrepreneurs what factors they believe led to their success. Some the key factors that female entrepreneurs valued more highly than males were professional and personal networks and support.

Read the article at the Kauffman Foundation for more.

John Chisholm is the founder, former CEO and chairman of Decisive Technology, a pioneer in online survey software (now part of Google), and of CustomerSat, a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems (now part of MarketTools). A 30-year veteran executive of Silicon Valley, he holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He chairs the MIT Club of Northern California, serves as trustee of the Santa Fe Institute, as member of the MIT Corporation Development Committee, and as mentor with the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. Previously, he has served as Chairman of the Board of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, one of Stanford’s twelve independent laboratories; as a member of the visiting committee of the MIT Department of Mathematics; and as vice president of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association. He is author or co-author of two patents in online polling. We met with Mr. Chisholm in the San Francisco bay area to explore his thoughts on the benefits and challenges of entrepreneurship.

Kaizen: You have founded two high-tech companies, Decisive Technology and CustomerSat. Were you technically oriented as a youth?

Chisholm: I think you would say so. I liked to take clocks apart and try to figure out how the gears and springs worked together. I grew up in Jupiter, Florida, a small town about 20 miles north of West Palm Beach. In junior high school, my best friend Al Pion and I each memorized pi to over 100 decimal places—we would recite it alternating the digits, like tossing a ball back and forth. Talk about geeky!

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ABC’s recent reality TV show Shark Tank is an American version of the BBC show Dragon’s Den, which we featured in a previous post. These shows share an intriguing premise: entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of successful businesspeople, in hopes of receiving venture capital or at least a helpful critique. There are a few clips on the official homepage, and many more on Hulu.