Shuttling between tech meetups, VC meetings and conferences, I realized that there are so many types of entrepreneurs that it would be a mistake to group them all under one general umbrella. So I tried to correct that horrible wrong with this list of all entrepreneur types from A-Z.
Classic example of a fantrepreneur photo courtesy of Phil Hawksworth
ALL ENTREPRENEURS FROM A - Z
Againtrepreneur
Just sold their 5th company in 3 years.
Bumtrepreneur
They litter the streets of San Francisco, sleeping in doorways and begging for spare change. They individually make more money in a month than most Web2.0 companies.
Can'trepreneur
5 failed startups and it's probably worth revisiting that 9-5 deskjob.
Don-trepreneur
The Godfather of investors for Entrepreneurs. You probably want to check your termsheets carefully for the clause on broken kneecaps.
Entrepreneur
General class that accurately describes only 5% of the groups on this page.
Fantrepreneur
HOLY CRAP KEVIN ROSE JUST WALKED INTO THE ROOM HAI KEVIN I LOVE DIGG CAN YOU GIVE ME TIPZ FOR MY STARTUP PLEAZE?
G-Z available after the jump...
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There is so much to learn from the implementations of design concepts in games that can be applied to non-gaming.
Almost everyone working on Aviary is an obsessive gamer. Besides for offering us a convenient (and violent) way to deflate, we also find a lot of inspiration in the underlying design. That's how I justify it to my wife, anyway.
Valve Software
Two games we are currently obsessed with are Team Fortress 2 and Portal, both created by Valve Software (most famous for its Half-Life series).
Valve's success as a software company stems from their philosophy of not compromising their story narrative for the sake of interactive gaming elements. Ironically enough, by forcing their game developers to work within more difficult parameters, they end up building better interactive elements as well!
Robin Walker, Valve employee and creator of Team Fortress 2 puts it best in the in-game commentary:
Holding ourselves to strong design principals can often force us to come up with better solutions than taking the easy route.
Lesson Learned: Limitations generate creative solutions.
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 is a game where users can choose between becoming one of nine different characters, each with unique abilities and limitations. Players will adopt different characters so that their team will be balanced properly. Having 9 different types of players running around on a field is plenty confusing. Teammates would have a hard time identifying and working with each other and finding certain characters they need (for example, a medic to recharge their health). That's not a problem in TF2 though, because Valve took the novel approach of designing the characters to be physical caricatures of their abilities, instantly recognizable by their silhouettes. Confusion is completely minimized.
Andrea Wicklund, another Valve employee, says:
The more your art direction can use well-understood visual representations the less work you have to do to explain you game elements.
Lesson Learned: Good design lies in the shapes.
How to apply it: Make sure your applications interactive elements (i.e. button icons) are all identifiable by their shapes alone. Exaggerated shapes are easier for people to identify and understand. Here's a great reference point.
Portal
Portal is a first-person shooter game where users are given an obstacle course and a single weapon: a gun that shoots portals. A user can open two portals simultaneously, and walking through one makes the user exit the other. The brilliance of Portal is in understanding that physics continues to operate normally in the background and must be used in helping navigate the obstacle course. For example, shoot one portal in the ceiling above you and one portal in the floor below you and you will begin to fall straight down between the portals (ad infinitum), increasing speed as you hurtle towards terminal velocity... pretty useful if you are trying to generate speed to hurtle yourself to a previously unreachable platform! 
What's amazing about Portal is that there are no true enemies or weapons in this first person shooter. It's nothing more than a mental challenge that defies you to solve puzzles by throwing away everything that feels right to you about physical interaction with the world. It is a completely new form of interaction with a previously existing genre of gaming.
Lesson Learned: Innovation can be found in minor refactoring.
In layman's terms: You don't need to reinvent the wheel to produce something completely novel.
There is a prevailing attitude amongst creators that it is better to release a prototype and rebuild it the right way if it becomes popular then building it the right way from scratch.
That's foolish, but it's also largely unavoidable, since you can never really know what problems exist with your prototype until their has been mass adoption of it. The Catch 22 is that if your prototype does get properly adopted, it's already too late to rebuild it from scratch.
There's a line at your door and they want immediate attention.
People don't wait around for you to change. Copycats spring up. Investors see revenue potential, customers attention spans are short. Your direction becomes one of patching the prototype and playing catch up with your scale requirements. Redesigning is impossible.
Initial design flaws seem obvious to us in hindsight, but they rarely are at the beginning. People don't think of a prototype as a prototype until they have to patch a new bug.
Take the Y2K bug: Why wouldn't computer programmers have thought about dates after the year 2000 when designing the first computer languages? It wasn't even that far off!
The truth is that most creators simply don't expect wide adoption and it is a lot easier to build a product without worrying about scalability. That's unfortunate, but it doesn't just apply to programmers writing applications.
There are so many real world examples of hacking being the only way to address a design flaw because mass adoption prevents re-addressing the underlying issue.
New Orleans
Why would original developers choose to build a city on lower ground than sea-level in an area prone to hurricanes? Why not import more land to raise the city above sea level?
The answer is that they probably didn't intend to build a city as big as it became and levies seemed a more realistic, economical solution in dealing with a smaller city. They never considered problems of scaling, because it's impossible to predict population growth.
A city grows around a current need (i.e. access to maritime trade) and remains standing once that need fades away. Then it is up to the new residents to continue developing on an infrastructure that was never intended to support continuous growth.
The design flaw becomes an inherent, unchangeable limitation based on mass adoption. You can't rebuild or move the city itself once it becomes obvious that it simply can't scale.
So New Orleans planners hacked their inherent design flaw by building a levy system instead of raising the city up higher in the first place. Woops.
English on the Internet
English has become the global language of the Internet.
Why? Because English-speaking people invented the prototype and didn't consider the global potential for it.
Because of this lack of foresight we are stuck with browsers that do not readily accept foreign language characters for URLs. Imagine how that limits countries where English isn't a first language. Take a look at the URLs for Wikipedia articles in non-English languages. Talk about non-intuitive usability!
And how wonderful for Google and other search engines that are the Hack to this terrible design flaw.
QWERTY Keyboards
The common layout of keyboards that almost all computers come with, known as QWERTY, causes problems of inefficiency and fatigue as people type. A more ideal layout is known as the Dvorak layout. It places keys in positions to improve efficiency in typing to almost double the current speed, but it's hardly been adopted at all.
So why did we even use a QWERTY layout in the first place? Because the concept of typing originated on a now extinct need (manual typewriters), and mass adoption of that character set has persisted a limitation.
The QWERTY layout was designed so that successive keystrokes would slow down typing and alternate between sides of the keyboard so as to avoid jams in typewriters. 
And now we're stuck with a mass adoption of a way of doing things that can't be redesigned. The Dvorak keyboard is a redesign instead of a hack and therefore it will never be adopted by the masses.
Others
Can you point out other real world design flaws where mass adoption limits us to hacking instead of redesigning?
I'd love to hear them.
One of the first steps in planning out development of your product is establishing your target audience.
In every industry there is a steep slope that represents market share and an important strategy decision has to be at which point on the slope do you enter? 
Target too high and you're catering an to important niche user base, but won't hit the broader consumer base for a while. Too low and gravity will keep you from ever making it higher up the slope.
In picking where to enter the market, most businesses base their decision on immediate return. It comes down to which portion of the market will give them the largest base for the lowest cost. Therefore most companies will take the bottom-up approach, targeting the bunny slopes first with a product that has broad consumer reach and lower costs to develop, before moving on to (or possibly choosing to pass up on) a more targeted and expensive market.
I think that can be short-sighted.
With Aviary we are taking the more unconventional top-down approach: Targeting a niche of semi-professionals with our tools first and then streamlining versions of our tools down for the masses, once advanced users are happy with them.
Why? It boils down to long-term branding effects and better software design. When your brand takes on elite connotations because it caters to the elite it becomes desirable to the masses. Sure, out of the gate you become the underdog as far as overall market share goes, but as time goes on and you begin to diversify you are left with an extremely strong brand, one that can be easily adapted for markets with broader, less-targeted ranges because of the branding strength and inherent software power. It's a matter of removing and simplifying features, not hacking onto a design that is not intended to be scalable.
The added benefit to a top-down approach is that you have nowhere to go revenue-wise but up, since your market base gets larger as you go further down the slope. Your market share only broadens as your products target range does.
The flip side is that companies that took the bottoms-up approach to grab as much overall market-share as possible often have nowhere to go but down. Professionals are bored by bunny slopes.
Case in point, recent news that Apple is finally worth more than IBM.
It's pretty tiring running a small web business - you're forced to constantly change your identity and mode of thinking.
- Mocking up a presentation? Enter Designer mode.
- Crunching figures on a spreadsheet? Enter Accountant mode.
- Tweaking your code base? Enter Programmer mode.
It's not the physical adoption of an identity that is exhausting. When I'm in a certain role, I am in a zone, focused on my specific task and nothing can distract me. But ask me to switch identities and my brain goes into shut down mode and I want nothing more than to procrastinate, anything but to don a new identity. The act of switching identities is simply exhausting.
I imagine that it's very much the dilemma Bruce Wayne faces every time he changes into Batman.
Actually being just Batman? Or even billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne? That's simply kick-ass. It's the changing process that's time consuming.
Think of the amount of work involved in slipping into your private study, finding the right book to trigger the secret entrance to the Bat Cave, removing your tuxedo, donning 100 pounds of protective gear and armor, ripping nylon tights on over your hairy legs, remembering to stop hitting on the ladies, remembering to start hitting on Robin...
It's not like Bruce Wayne can just slide down a pole and instantly turn into Batman, right?
On second thought... strike that.
So how does a small business operator cope? I think the best thing you can do is to force yourself into a majority role-a-day mode. Don't try to change your identity too many times in one day, unless you absolutely have to. If you designate specific days for specific tasks instead of chunking your day into smaller pieces spent on multi-tasking, you begin to spend more time in the zone and less in mental transitioning.
Friday for me is the day I pay my bills and do accounting; Weekends are for thought process and planning; Monday's are for networking follow-up; Tuesdays and Thursdays are wild cards, usually used for programming, UI testing or design.
And Wednesdays? On Wednesdays it's business time.
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