I didn't set out to be a Playpreneur. I set out to figure out why certain organizations felt alive and others felt like they were running on fumes and compliance. The answer, it turned out, kept circling back to the same thing: the ones that were actually thriving had somehow kept play in the building. Not as a perk, not as a reward — as a practice.
The word Playpreneur came out of a workshop I was running in 2021, somewhere between a whiteboard exercise and a conversation that had gone productively off the rails. I needed a word for what I was trying to describe — someone who builds, leads, and innovates through a fundamentally playful orientation to the world — and nothing I had fit. So I made one up.
What surprised me was how quickly other people recognized themselves in it. Not because everyone who does creative, innovative, entrepreneurial work thinks of themselves as playful — quite the opposite, actually. But because there's a relief in naming something you've always felt but never had language for. The Playpreneur isn't someone who takes nothing seriously. It's someone who takes play seriously.
Building a brand and a career around a word I invented has been one of the stranger and more rewarding experiments of my professional life. It's meant turning down opportunities that didn't fit, explaining myself in rooms that weren't sure what to do with me, and occasionally questioning whether the whole thing was a very elaborate mistake. It wasn't. Or if it was, it's the best mistake I've made.
If you're reading this and something in the word resonates — even a little, even reluctantly — I suspect you already know what a Playpreneur is. You've been one. You just needed someone to say it out loud.
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I write about play, leadership, Women in Tech, and building things that matter. More posts below — or reach out if you want to talk.