The Newest Entrepreneurs (Credit: All American Blogger)
As you may know, on of our new contributing bloggers is Jessie Newburn, a generational marketing expert who just published her framework on “What is Generational Marketing?” and “Generational Communication Styles”.
Recently, the newest generation of entrepreneurs have been taking on the roughest economy. This generation, according to Jessie is called “Millennials” but have been called Generation Y and, with the election of Barack Obama, have been dubbed “Generation O. This generation is born from 1980 to 2000, they are as different from as my generation (Generation X) and their parents (Boomers) in how they view starting a business as well as the economy in general.
When I started my first business 10 years ago, I was 29 years old and the Interent boom was roaring upward (soon to crash) and things were fantastic. With Mark Andresen and Mark Cuban becoming billionaires overnight, everyone my age with a little risk taking tolerance and some savings were going to start the next great dot-com and retire by 35. Sounded sweet but as we all know, it wouldn’t last.
According to Jessie, my generation are a bunch of nomadic people caught in between a generation that won’t get out of the way (boomers) and one that wants to save the world (Gen-Y). Generation X was about “Doing it Differently” because we had the Internet and we could raise a few million and get the business to IPO in 18 months while knocking out the established businesses who had been doing things solidly for decades. Because our boomer or silent generation parents were either stuck in their way of doing things differently or won’t allow us to sit at the table. We built our own shiny table with new toys for the world to play with – Re: Yahoo, Google, Netscape, Broadcast.com, etc. While it is true that my generation created some truly spectacular flops – re: Pets.com, Kozmo, every dotcom that failed, we did break new ground and put in place the systems and services that run most of the worlds businesses today.
According to Inc. Magazine, Millennials look at starting a business in a different way. In their article “The Gen-Y Spin on Startups” they see Gen-Y as the entrepreneurial generation that at its core believes it is about “Doing it Better”. When I look at this new generation of entrepreneurs I see improvements to our initial innovations. We eventually got Quicken Online but they went and created Mint.com, we got the newspapers online and they created Digg, we got people searching the web and they enabled everyone to connect through Facebook.
To quote All American Blog, technology has transformed how they interact with each other and the world. Not only are they computer literate, but the Internet has allowed them to have friends from around the world who are available at the touch of a keystroke. Think about – 15 years ago there were very few cell phones, just dial up per-hour Internet, no Twitter, no Facebook so this generation is naturally tuned to using these systems and seeing how to improve on them faster than anyone else.
While they ironically face an economic challenge similar to what their great-grandparents faced in the 1930′s and 1940′s. The also have the advantage of lower startup costs than ever before and a strong desire to make change happen on their own without any one telling them they should or they can’t.
Luckily, my generation as survivors and ones who adapt will be innovating to keep up with this generation and will be awesome to see what businesses they start over the next decade. More on this in future post and if you are a milenial starting a business or have a perspective on this topic please leave a comment, we would love to hear from you.
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