I’ve been chatting with a friend for months about something we’ve both noticed: there are people who excel at their highly technical profession because of years of training and experience and who would like to be entrepreneurs. We call them practitioners. They often continue to work for others because they don’t understand business. They’re aspiring entrepreneurs, but they don’t have the skillsets necessary to be successful entrepreneurs. They understand a problem and how to provide a solution to it, but they don’t understand how to build a business around that understanding because they haven’t been exposed to business concepts.

The more I’ve thought about this, the more I think these practitioners could be great cofounders. They have deep expertise in their craft and the problem it solves but large gaps around monetizing it. They’re very aware of their gaps and want help filling them, but they don’t usually have entrepreneurs in their network—just other practitioners. An ambitious practitioner paired with a hungry hustler who gets things done and understands business could be a combination with a high probability of succeeding.

I’m going to think more about this and discuss it in more detail with practitioners who have entrepreneurial aspirations.