“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
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.
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.
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.
Successful startups have spawned thousands of wealthy, young, predominantly male, workers who spend the majority of their daily 24 hours on a computer programming, gaming and surfing.
Additionally, more often than not, if they aren’t on their computer they’re doing the same stuff on their cell phone.
Most have little social life and fewer real-world social skills; more comfortable interacting with their buddies than with someone of the opposite sex.
Over the last few years ‘entrepreneur’ has come to mean anyone starting any kind of business.
The abundance and easy access to a myriad of Internet tools combined with the power of social media marketing makes it simple to start and run a business, whether it’s all online or has a real-world presence.
Josephine” — a local prostitute — arranges a collection of t-shirts across the table. They’re emblazoned with phrases like “Winter is Coming” and “Geeks Make Better Lovers.” She wears them in her online ads to catch the eye of the area’s well-off engineers and programmers.
“I’m trying to communicate to them that I understand a little bit what it’s like to be techy, nerdy, geeky,” she says. There’s another thing Josephine and her clients have in common: Like many of the techies she caters to, Josephine views herself as an entrepreneur. (…)”I’m quoting Belle de Jour, who did Secret Diary of a Call Girl, but you know, you sell the strength of your arms when you dig a hole. Selling our bodies — which everyone thinks of as this big scary thing — anyone who has a job that requires labor does that.”
I don’t see this as a bad thing, as long as pimps, drugs and coercion are not present and the cops seem to agree.
Kyle Oki of the San Jose Police Department, works on San Jose’s Human Trafficking Task Force, which focuses on stopping coerced prostitution. He sees technology as one of the sex trade’s biggest growth drivers.
Some of the women have day jobs, but not all.
“I consider the sex work that I do my career,” Siouxsie says. “I would like the podcast to be a vehicle to really humanize sex work and have people see that I am just a girl trying to make a living and pursue the American dream.”
What I do consider sad is that most of the guys don’t have a clue to handling themselves in social situations.
Stryker’s a comics fan with tattoos of molecules on her neck who considers herself a natural-born nerd, and is happy to “train” geeky clients on how to interact with those they’re smitten with. “You explain it to them in a way that’s like a formula,” she says. “Then they say ‘ohhhh, math. It’s math. Eventually if I plug these things into the formula, it will work.’
They both say the work is lonely. “Luckily, I have a buddy now who holds my camera for me,” Mr. Weisz said.
Ms. Mourey, on the other hand, still operates the camera by herself. She is adjusting to living alone in a city where, for all her Internet fame, she has few friends and rarely goes out.
Like lots of other YouTube personalities, Ms. Mourey said, “for the most part, we all just stay in our houses, alone, making videos.”
Your twenties used to be a time to learn about yourself in relation to other people; develop interpersonal skills that would last a lifetime and form relationships that would do the same.
It makes me wonder what kind of future life these kids will live.
I get a kick out of reading interviews with Andrew Mason, Groupon’s 29 year old CEO. I find him refreshing; he seems to be missing the ego usually so obvious among entrepreneur superstars.
Most people are uncomfortable talking about themselves, which is why they dislike writing resumes and interviewing, but when they are highly successful they rarely admit it. Mason, on the other hand, has no such hesitation, “I’m just not used to talking that much about myself. It feels strange,”
Entrepreneurs, and those who write about them, love to tell how they always wanted to be an entrepreneur and started as a kid by selling whatever to their neighbors. Mason is an exception, “I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur before this,” he has often said, “and I still really don’t. I just like to build things and do things.”
As to planning out his career, “I never really planned my life more than one month in advance. I try to chase whatever I think is the most interesting thing to do at the moment, and if it becomes less interesting, I find something else to do.”
But he must have planned Groupon, right? Wrong. It was actually started as a side effort to support a different social enterprise. “There was a kind of freedom that came with not caring if it failed, and caring primarily that it was something we could be proud of.”
Mason also doesn’t see Groupon mainly as a technology function, “Really, it’s a way to get out of the house, to explore the city—an expensive city—and to spend more time with your friends or loved ones.”
Mason is young and many wonder how he will avoid being a shooting star instead of a major light in the online firmament as has happened to far more experienced CEOs, but I think he has the perfect approach, “I’m hopeful that as long as we continue to think that we suck and try to be better every day than we were the day before, then we can avoid a similar fate.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if more CEOs channeled Andrew Mason?
Entrepreneurs, you got to love ’em—at least most of the time.
Two great interviews today; just two because one if fairly long.
First is Dany Levy, founder and editorial director of DailyCandy in an interview conducted by Anthony (Tony) Tjan, CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of Cue Ball, a venture and early growth equity firm.
Daily Candy is “a daily email newsletter that provides readers with an essential nugget of hip, insider advice about “what to do today,” began in New York and soon spread to a dozen other U.S. cities and London.” Levy took in one majority investor 2003 and the company was recently acquired by Comcast for $125 million.
There is both a written interview and a video, but Harvard doesn’t provide embeddable code, so you’ll have to go there.
Next, Henry Blodget interviews 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg who “started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004. Five years later, it has 300 million users and $500 million in revenue, and it’s worth something north of $6 billion.”
Many wonder what someone that age know about running a company that size, but Zuckerberg makes the case for not only hiring those smarter than you, something every has heard, but also listening to them.
Below is the full interview, the short version is here, if you prefer, but the full interview is well worth watching.
Do you sometimes get the impression that, like the garage of “olden” times, the college dorm room is where most startups start? That founders are dominantly twenty-somethings, many who skipped or quit college, who got some friends together and grabbed the brass ring?
Even more hilariously, do you believe that startups are a by-product of the Internet, as has been frequently explained over the last 15 years to me by younger, more nimble minds?
You may if you go by the media, since even old media focuses obsessively on young entrepreneurs doing wild things on the Net from their dorm rooms.
Not so.
“…a new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers at Duke and Harvard universities reveals most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are middle-aged, well-educated, and hold degrees from a wide assortment of universities.”
I found this information at Dobbs Code Talk where Jon Erickson’s great post highlights key points in the study (note that the focus is US-born founders of engineering and tech companies), the first two being that
twice as many U.S.-born tech entrepreneurs start ventures in their 50s as do those in their early 20s.
elite, highly ranked schools are over-represented in the ranks of these founders, and Ivy-League graduates achieve the greatest business success; however, 92 percent of U.S.-born founders graduate from other universities.
According to Vivek Wadhwa, the study’s lead researcher and a Wertheim fellow with the Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University,
“While education clearly is an advantage for tech founders in the United States, experience also is a key factor.”
Click on over to read more and for a link to the actual report, you’ll find both interesting reading.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Granted you want to change the world, but whose world?
Successful startups have spawned thousands of wealthy, young, predominantly male, workers who spend the majority of their daily 24 hours on a computer programming, gaming and surfing.
I get a kick out of reading interviews with Andrew Mason, Groupon’s 29 year old CEO. I find him refreshing; he seems to be missing the ego usually so obvious among entrepreneur superstars.
Entrepreneurs, you got to love ’em—at least most of the time.
Do you sometimes get the impression that, like the garage of “olden” times, the college dorm room is where most startups start? That founders are dominantly twenty-somethings, many who skipped or quit college, who got some friends together and grabbed the brass ring?
