Life of FBi | Non-Tech Start-up Founder

it’s all about sex appeal, and it seems that the cash-poor, unglamorous, ramen filled world of startups has managed to overtake the steel and glass tall buildings, expense accounts and suit and tie life of investment banking in the eyes of college students. of course the first reaction most people while have is d’oh, financial crisis mr blogger? isn’t it obvious. they’ve probably already clicked out.

for those of you who haven’t, i want to engage in a conversation with you that suggests the fundamentals of why young people are thinking more seriously about getting involved in startups, either by founding one, or joining one early-stage, is more fundamental than the economy and the fewer job opportunities on wall street. When I threw away my aspirations to be an investment banking superstar (check out the loser on the left), I thought I was being some kind of rebel, but as most instance in my life, nothing all that special, just context. If you look around, you see a new breed of college student, people call us Gen Yers, Generation U, Millenials. At Blank Label we call ‘us’ Connected Individuals, and have coined the term #CONNECTEDINDIVIDUALISM. We’re impatient, generally needy, have been brought up fairly entitled, mostly in small families. We associate with independence, we see more young people than ever doing really cool shit. And that really cool shit is not making money off the buying and selling of others. Yes, that was a jibe at bankers.

But if you think about those characteristics as a generation we generally embody, a lot of them are closely correlated with why young people are starting companies these days. We’re giving the finger to the corporate rat race. We’re thankfully irrational enough to think we actually have a decent shot of founding a startup, I’m sure by serious of orders of magnitude if you measured what young founders thought their chance of success was vs what was realistic based on balance of probabilities, the economy would be seriously worried. Thankfully that’s a hard study to do. What the real catalyst driving a lot of this is the actual success of young entrepreneurs.  Much of the reason why I wanted to go into banking is because peers who were a few years older were talking about the six figure salary, the friday night open bar parties, the ass-kicking intensity. This was all incredibly sexy to me. And amazingly, sex appeal is important to a young 20 something year old male. With the growing list of young rockstar entrepreneurs spread around, the attention has turned to being sexy by starting a company. And think about the ego rush of a young person hiring someone older than them. Damn! And the king of them all Zucks is getting a freaking movie made about him!

Entrepreneurs south of 30 will always be a minority in comparison to those who spend time as academics or research experts, those who get corporate gigs, and those who just want to spend their time surfing. Everyone’s different, everyone’s passionate about different things, and I fully respect that. But there’s no doubt in my mind that this generational group of entrepreneurs has been growing over the last 10 years, and will grow at an even quicker rate in the next 10 years. Make no mistake, I am not qualifying necessarily massive hits from young entrepreneurs, only that more young people are founding companies or getting involved in startups. What this really stresses is that there’s an amazing opportunity for schools, government and the investment community to seriously change the impact young people have the future of the world, and it’s amazing how large an impact small tweaks can have.