Fritinancy

Word of the Week: Infrapreneur

Infrapreneur: An entrepreneur who specializes in enterprise infrastructure*.

Infrapreneur is a blend of two 19th-century additions to English: infrastructure (originally a military term; literally, the installations beneath the structure) and entrepreneur (originally the manager or promoter of a theatrical production, then a business manager in general, and now a person who starts a business).

Navin Chaddha, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, wrote about infrapreneurs for TechCrunch last weekend:

The software-defined data center should be a call to all entrepreneurs focused on enterprise infrastructure that the past does not predict the future, but it can be undone by it. …Today’s enterprise infrastructure startup leaders need to be focused on pairing innovative software with commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. They are, in essence, software “infrapreneurs.”

Chaddha isn’t the first person to combine the infra- prefix with the -preneur suffix. However, an earlier usage carried a different definition.

On October 10, 2011, the UnSectored blog published a post by Laura Tomasko titled “Hello, I’m an Infrapreneur.” UnSectored, located “in DC and beyond,” calls itself “a community platform for re-thinking change.” Tomasko writes:

Last fall, I co-facilitated a discussion on “Social Innovation in the Public Sector” at the StartingBloc All Fellows’ Summit. During this conversation, we asked participants to think about how careers in policy and law could connect to and enhance the field of social innovation.

StartingBloc, a fellowship for emerging leaders interested in driving social impact across sectors, describes its Fellows either as social entrepreneurs who want to start something new; intrapreneurs who want to improve an existing system; or  a fuzzy third category for those generally interested in change-making and partnerships. It turns out that the StartingBloc Fellows who showed up to our session about the role for public and legal sectors in social innovation were the ones who didn’t easily identify as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs.

In our session, we discussed systems and structures to support coordinated action, and aligning incentives and creating regulations that drive behavior. Not to be left out of the social-sector lexicon, we decided we wanted a way to identify our passion for infrastructure in the social innovation space. We want to create change by developing and connecting systems, or strengthening the plumbing that makes it all work. And from this, “infrapreneur” was born.

Emphasis added.

Portmanteaus built on -preneur—from Aquapreneur to zoopreneur—have been popular for years. As I wrote last year in a column for the Visual Thesaurus, the earliest coinage, intrapreneur, appeared in a 1978 paper about “Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship.” Since then, as entrepreneurship has become central to the success myth—a recent survey found that two-thirds of people in the millennial generation, now age 18 to 34, want to start their own businesses—new hybrid-preneurs pop up regularly. In addition to infrapreneur, I recently spotted expat-preneur (“a traditional expatriate with an entrepreneurial nature”), Etsy-preneur (a person using the peer-to-peer commerce site Etsy to run a business), and opera-preneur (“take charge of your career!”).

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* Enterprise infrastructure:“the composite hardware, software, network resources and services required for the existence, operation and management of an enterprise IT environment” (Technopedia).

On the Visual Thesaurus: A Very Enterprising Suffix

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus, “A Very Enterprising Suffix,” looks at the rise and spread of -preneur, which has detached itself from entrepreneur and become a self-sufficient, up-by-its-bootstraps element of word creation.

Access is restricted to subscribers ($19.95 a year) is open to all! Here’s an excerpt:

Since 2001, U.S. trademarks have been registered for Christian-preneur, Dentalpreneur, Teenpreneur, Homepreneur, Kitchenpreneur, Media-preneur, Super-preneur, The Passion-preneur, and Message-preneur, among others. In more-informal use you'll find eco-preneur, journopreneur, oeno-trepreneur (New York magazine's description of Gary Vaynerchuk, "the leading grape guru of the Internet"), pastor-preneur (a minister who offers wealth-creation advice), solopreneur, webpreneur, and warrior-preneur (the nom de preneur of San Francisco Bay Area speaker/coach/consultant Ann M. Evanston). I suppose you might call me and my fellow name developers onoma-preneneurs.

Read the rest of the column.

I’ve been charting the -preneur phenomenon for almost five years. Here’s my original blog post on the subject, published in September 2009.

Hauntrepreneurs

 You probably know about my fascination with the productive -preneur suffix ("Enterprising Language," Sept. 1). Everyone, it seems, is a specialized entrepreneur these days—a mompreneur, solopreneur, warrior-preneur, or journopreneur.*

Here's a new-to-me -preneur, just in time for Halloween: Hauntrepreneurs International (tagline: "Haunted Attractions for Sale!").

That's a dandy coinage: It's witty, it echoes the sound of entrepreneur, and it instantly communicates its meaning.

The website, however, is short on wit and long on get-'er-done:

Hauntrepreneurs® International is the only broker specializing in selling previously owned Haunted Houses, Haunted Hay Rides, Haunted Trails, Dark Rides and Haunting Equipment for the Haunted Attraction Industry. Formed in 1987 the company has sold hundreds of attractions to Amusement Parks, Family Fun Centers and individuals all over the country.

Working as a middleman Hauntrepreneurs® International hammers out price negotiations, prepares contracts and makes sure that both parties act in good faith throughout the process. In addition, Hauntrepreneurs® International can provide services to the buyer/seller including Installation Assistance, Event Consulting, Refurbishment and Attraction Redesign.

“We put our reputation on the line each time we bring a buyer and seller together, and strive to create a ‘Win win’ opportunity for the clients!”

"Win win"? Ugh, ugh.

Which is not to say there aren't treasures to be found here. Do, for instance, take a few minutes to check out the "attractions" for sale. Here is a very partial list of the props included with the Haunted Estate (15,000 square feet; "only $175,000"):

20 Tiki Torches
1 Old Style Dryer
1 Body Bag (real)
1 Stretcher/Gurney
3 Medical Back Boards
10 Soft Stuffed Bodies
2 Oscilloscopes
1 Resuscitation Annie
1 Defibrillator (real)
1 Wheelchair
1 Electric Typewriter
1 Exercise Bike
1 Trunk
2 set Funeral Parlor Curtains
1 Electric Leaf Blower
1 Electric Sparking Chain Saw

Check, check, check ... hold on: Exercise bike?

Hauntrepreneurs International is based in Charlotte, North Carolina. Operators are standing by, no doubt cackling ghoulishly. 

Hat tip: Erin McKean. Image from Buried.com.

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* I have searched in vain for manurepreneur, a coinage in search of a business plan.

Enterprising Language

I recently came across a Twitter bio in which someone described himself as a webrepreneur¹. The meaning was clear enough (someone who does enterprising things on the Internet), but the pronunciation—whew! I tweeted about it and got a response from someone who mentioned ecopreneur as another tongue-twisty job title, and that reminded me of an even chewier mouthful: philanthropreneur ("someone who brings an entrepreneurial approach to philanthropy"), a word that's been around since 1997.

We may be in a recession, or a mancession, but there are plenty of jobs for -preneur, a suffix that at first blush has little to recommend it for English word-building. It's often misspelled and even more frequently mispronounced, as though the first or second R weren't there. It's a loan word from French, the noun form of entreprendre, "to undertake." Nevertheless, an entrepreneur has never been (or not only been) what we might call an undertaker: someone who manages a funeral business. "The word first crossed the Channel c.1475, but did not stay," the Online Etymology Dictionary informs us. It had better success in 1828, when it re-landed in England and became a compact way of saying "one who undertakes or manages." It was sometimes used as a synonym for "capitalist."

At some point in the 1990s, that definition became too generic, and entrepreneur began giving birth to a slew of enterprising neologisms, some using a long-form morpheme, -trepreneur, and some truncating it to -preneur. The term for art for inventive blends like these is cran-morph, from the cran- of cranberry that floated free and formed cran-apple and cran-grape. Double-Tongued Dictionary has captured some of the cran-preneurs; the dates in parentheses are when the term was first spotted in print:

Alterpreneur (5/16/05): someone motivated by a lifestyle change to start a business.
Con-trepreneur (12/20/04): an enterprising con woman (in Kenya, apparently).²
Copreneur (2/10/06): a spouse who goes into business with his or her marriage partner.
Grantepreneur (12/9/94) or grantrepreneur (8/16/00)³: someone whose business plan chiefly involves government grants. The first variation originally appeared in Ireland, the second in Canada.
Innerpreneur (3/26/09): an entrepreneur motivated by personal growth.
Momtrepreneur (12/9/06): a young mother juggling home duties with a home business.
Mama-preneur (3/30/06): see momtrepreneur. ("Mama-preneur" is considerably easier to pronounce, but appears to be less popular, if numbers of Google hits are to be believed.)
Pastorpreneur (2/23/06): a religious leader of a U.S. mega-church; a minister who offers wealth-creation advice.

I fully expected to see mantrepreneur (a male entrepreneur? a businessperson specializing in bromance?) on the list. But no! Not only is mantrepreneur nearly missing in action from Google, but the mantrepreneur.com domain was available when I checked late Monday. Go for it, guys!

Meanwhile, my own research turned up a passel of -preneurs, some hyphenated, some not:

Actor-preneur
Authorpreneur
Crowdpreneur
Cyberpreneur
E-preneur
Entry-preneur⁴
Food-preneur
Indie-preneur
ITPreneur
Journopreneur
Kidpreneur
Mom-preneur
Mommypreneur
Senior-preneur
Solopreneur
Techno-preneur
Ultrapreneur
Warrior-preneur⁵

 

^{And a tribe of harder-to-pronounce -trepreneurs:}

^{App-trepreneur
E-trepreneur}
Fun-trepreneur
I-trepreneur ("a mlogish blogazine," it says here)
Oeno-trepreneur (that would be Gary Vaynerchuk, wine maven)
Spa-trepreneur
Teen-trepreneur (a Monopoly-like board game for—you guessed it—teens)
Untrepreneur (my favorite!)
Vetrepreneur (surprisingly, not a veterinarian)

I searched in vain for zoopreneur, which sounds zippy and fun. Or how about a Seinfeld-ish soupreneur? Hélas, rien. And I was disappointed to find only a handful of papapreneurs, popreneurs, dadpreneurs, and daddypreneurs compared to all the mom- and mama-preneurs.

The last and least of the -preneurs may be nontrepreneur⁶ . Suggested slogan: Just don't do it.

Have you seen any unusual -preneur blends? Leave a comment; please include a citation or a link.

UPDATE: Illustrator/designer David Billings, a k a Sparky Firepants, calls himself an artrepreneur in his Twitter bio. (Hat tip: Kelly Parkinson, a k a Copylicious.)

 

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^{¹By the way, the Twitter fellow isn't the only one calling himself a webrepreneur. In fact, there's a book, The Webrepreneur's Guide to Funding Your Business. Good luck selling it on the radio! There are many more people calling themselves webpreneurs. One less syllable makes it somewhat easier to pronounce, although the -bp- combination still twists the tongue.}

^{² Urban Dictionary gives another definition: "An online seller of goods on eBay, Amazon, or other such virtual pawn shops."}

^{³ No doubt of special interest to Grant Barrett, Doubletongued's editor.}

⁴ I have no idea what this means.

⁵ Surprisingly, not an organization for soldiers of fortune.

6 See Mike Pope's blog Evolving English II for more on nontrepreneur and other -preneur cran-morphs. I especially like "Don Juantrepreneur: No business plan, but still charms women into providing funding," from a blog post by James Britt.