In business school, we talked a lot about entrepreneurship and we adapted the idiom "ham and egging" to mean the way entrepreneurs need to ask for a whole lot from their early employees, vendors, and customers. Say you had your first signed customer, the "ham and egging" entrepreneur would take that contract immediately to the bank to ask for money, investors to ask for capital, or vendors to ask for credit. I can't find any real-world usage that mirrors this b-school usage. Ham and egging means, variously, someone with minimal talent, legs, baseball's double play, plugging away at a task, or begging. Maybe it was the begging usage we were adapting—the entrepreneur does a lot of asking. Whether our usage was right or not, the newly started company needs to bridge a big gap between what it wants to be and what it is. There are a lot of opportunities to fake it until you make it. That's where they get into trouble.