If the Shoe Fits: Startups of Value
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
Granted you want to change the world, but whose world?
“If we live in a world where the technologies we’re talking about are for rich white people in Silicon Valley then we’ve failed. The idea is to try and distribute this technology as broadly as possible.” –Bill Maris, founder, Google Ventures
So true.
But what else would you expect when entrepreneurs follow the advice to look inward to identify the problems to solve.
And then there is the question of what purpose our economic growth actually serves. The most common advice V.C.s give entrepreneurs is to solve a problem they encounter in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the problems the average 22-year-old male programmer has experienced are all about being an affluent single guy in Northern California.
Unfortunately, the traits common to entrepreneurs in the US aren’t particularly diverse.
The average U.S. entrepreneur is educated with a college degree, closer to mid-career in age, from a higher income household, and more likely to be male. He is likely to be opportunity-motivated and comparatively likely to be operating in the knowledge-intensive sector (business services).
Most of the under-thirty entrepreneurs whose startups have a strong social side found the problem while traveling or doing some kind of volunteer work and used ingenuity and tech-as-appropriate to solve it.
Other places to find young entrepreneurs focused on solving serious problems are at any of the major science fairs, such as Google’s, and the Society for Science and the Public’ awards to the under 13 crowd.
The Federal Government, in the guise of the National Science Foundation started Innovation Corps, essentially an incubator using the Lean approach to commercialize academic research with the help of Steve Blank; those entrepreneurs are definitely older.
The opportunities to change the world are numerous, all you need to do is open your eyes — if a 13-year-old can think of way to change the world, so can you.
Image credit: HikingArtist
