Can you be a successful entrepreneur without being passionate?
pg: Yes.  I wouldn't say we were passionate about Viaweb.  We found some of the technical challenges interesting, we liked the idea of helping our users, we wanted to make money, we didn't want to have bosses, and we didn't want to seem like failures to our friends.  But we weren't jumping up and down about e-commerce.What I did want passionately was (a) to get enough money to be free to do what I wanted, and (b) not to fail.  The latter alone is probably enough of a motivator for most people who would make good founders.