Nate Westheimer is a model example of today's technological entrepreneur. He is the founder of the Web site BricaBox, LLC. He is executive vice president of Product and Technology at a startup company called AnyClip, which runs a Web site that indexes films and allows people to watch videos and search within them for information, scenes and actors that current data cannot find. He is also executive director of the NY Tech Meetup, an organization for tech startups in the New York area. Where did he go to school? Brandeis, Class of 2005. Although Brandeis is one of the most prestigious liberal arts schools in the country and has only recently launched its own Business major, it is a place where aspiring entrepreneurs can come to not only learn about business but also to discover passions that will fuel later entrepreneurial ventures.

The Brandeis International Business School and its Asper Center for Entrepreneurship provide courses in entrepreneurship that are available to undergraduate students.

Many Brandeis students have gone on to become entrepreneurs after graduating, but their personal traits all differ.

"[Entrepreneurs have] almost every personality characteristic identified," says Prof. Charles Reed (IBS), co-director of the Asper Center for Entrepreneurship and former entrepreneur.

Reed was a "global marketing exexecutive," as he thought of himself back then, and he managed companies and parts of companies.

Westheimer describes entrepreneurs as "people who wake up every morning with a fire in their belly."

"The people I know all have a burning desire to be excellent," says Westheimer.

He tells the story of an entrepreneur named Kevin Ryan, who was then CEO of online advertising network DoubleClick and who now runs business incubator AlleyCorp, a firm that helps new business ventures develop into mature, profitable companies. Ryan went on to buy one of the countries he was managing.

Ryan wanted to learn how to play Ping-Pong. To discipline himself to achieve a sense of excellence, this entrepreneur took lessons from a pro until he was not good at it, but excellent at it.

Reed says that passion is an integral part of being an entrepreneur.

"There are so many obstacles that if you don't have passion, you're just going to give up," says Reed.

However, while Westheimer agrees that passion is a good thing, he cautions that passion requires a vetting process where the entrepreneur must play the role of venture capitalist, not visionary.

The difference? A visionary looks at a business venture for factors like its possibilities and creativity; venture capitalists use a more realistic approach and judge the value of a business venture by whether there is a need for it and whether or not it can make money. Westheimer advocates this latter point of view.

According to Westheimer, entrepreneurs must also practice their craft. Westheimer suggests that especially those students interested in tech entrepreneurship should start to "hack," meaning they need to come up with projects and experiment.

Students can create coded Web sites or use a simplified content management system like Wordpress or Drupal to build their ideas into reality. Students need to scratch that entrepreneurial itch, as Westheimer calls it.

Westheimer himself was very involved in Brandeis Television while at Brandeis. In fact, when he was trying to decide what career field to choose, people suggested film and video based on how much time he spent working at BTV.

At BTV, he helped introduce video streaming and user-generated videos. The club also did a live webcast in December 2004. And this was before the concept of big video-sharing sites like YouTube, Westheimer points out. Now he works at AnyClip, a startup company that advances the way people use and interact with video.

Mark Shirman '79 is what's called a serial entrepeneur, or a person that starts several companies, one after another.

He started his first company, Innovative Information Systems, 2 1/2 years ago after getting his M.B.A. from American University. In August 2001 he started another business, GlassHouse Technologies, a consulting services company focused on data center operations.

Shirman suggests that students should get used to learning from their mistakes, especially for tech entrepreneurship.

Shirman says the next best thing after learning the technology on your own is to surround yourself with people who have that technical knowledge needed and whose skills will complement your own skills.

Shirman also advises students to become more flexible and resilient because in businesses. Shirman says, aspiring entrepreneurs will face a lot of people saying "no" and will have to build up their resilience to succeed.

Former IBS professor, CEO of Marketing Edge Consulting Group and author of The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Toolkit Beth Goldstein '85 also lends her advice on what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

She says that while being an entrepreneur is exciting, it still involves a lot of risk-taking.

"Entrepreneurs need to be good risk-takers," says Goldstein. Because of this, Goldstein thinks a liberal arts education is important to entrepreneurship.

"[Students] need to discover new things, which is why I think a liberal arts education is phenomenal: because it teaches you how to think. You learn how to ask really tough questions. That's how you get good at what you're doing. And the best entrepreneurs I've worked with are really effective at that," says Goldstein.

Goldstein says the key for students is to learn new things.She says the teachers who gave her the most valuable advice were those who pushed her to think outside the box. What could it look like instead of what does it look like. Goldstein says that students should not just accept everything they learn as fact, but should learn to think for themselves.

Correction appended: The first version of this article referred to the Asper Center for Entrepreneurship as the Aspen Center for Entrepreneurship.