A new term for people capable of building within an organization, and building on their own
M&A has been part of many of our careers, and certain stories repeat themselves. One is the story of the entrepreneur who joins an organization as part of an acquisition.
The scenario is this: A founder sells their company and stays on to run it as a business unit leader. Are they still an entrepreneur, or something else now?
There's a new term for it, one I coined after hearing this question again and again.
You may have encountered the term "ambivert." It describes someone who functions effectively as both an introvert and an extrovert, depending on the situation. It resonates because it names something real that the terms introvert and extrovert, on their own, cannot.
The same gap exists in the world of innovation.
We have a word for someone who builds from within a larger organization: intrapreneur. We have a word for someone who builds their own venture: entrepreneur. But what do we call someone who moves fluidly between both worlds, sometimes multiple times in a career?
Ambipreneur.
The most vivid example is a founder who sells their company to a larger organization and stays. Technically, they are now an intrapreneur. But their entrepreneurial capability didn't just disappear at closing. The reverse happens too: corporate leaders who set out to build their own ventures don't leave their organizational instincts at the door.
Here's why this matters beyond the label. Both intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship are practices, with distinct skills, rhythms, and rules of engagement. The ambipreneur who adapts consciously when navigating between the two can unlock outsized impact. Done without awareness, it can produce friction, missed opportunities, and a quiet erosion of credibility.
That adaptation requires specific skills and behaviors. I'll be exploring those in future posts and, for those interested, through workshops currently in development. For a deeper foundation on intrapreneurship itself, my book The Inside Innovator is a good place to start.