They say that you should be an entrepreneur even when you’re an employee, meaning that having an entrepreneurial state of mind is good for you (and your employer) even when you don’t somehow own the company.
And they are right.
Nonetheless, not all companies recognize that entrepreneurial employees are good for them. Some are afraid of them. Some just think that all they need are plain old nine-to-five card-punching employees and that those entrepreneurs would simply cause more headaches than needed.
It just takes a whole different kind of person to be a vanilla corporate employee than it takes to make a business-owning entrepreneur. Corporate recruiters know and recognize that. It is hard for a corporate employee to make it into full-time business owner, but in some companies it is even harder for an outside entrepreneur to get hired. It isn’t impossible, but it is much harder depending on the company (and position) you consider. Sometimes it just feels like it’s a one-way trip.
I remember once hearing someone saying (or writing, or I could be just making that up) that Bill Gates was able to build a multi-billion company around him, but wouldn’t be able to climb the corporate ladder in a big company like Microsoft. There’s just too much politics that problem-solving business types aren’t interested in. Sometimes I think people like him are able to build such companies exactly because they couldn’t climb the corporate ladder.