Youth rocking business

Youth rocking business

Stories of guys and girls who start a company whilst still in university are mind blowing. Take the Hungarian born Tom Szaky . At the age of 19 he noticed that the excrement of worms makes a great fertilizer and together with a friend, launched a company selling the faeces: TerraCycle became a big hit and sells to big players like WalMart. And what about the American Genevieve Thiers who noticed through her dorm room window that a pregnant woman was posting fliers for a baby-sitter around the campus? That was the beginning of sittercity.com, a website that nowadays promotes babysitters, dog walkers and caretakers in the USA. It has over a million profiles.

The American journalist Donna Fenn interviewed a bunch of CEO’s under thirty and wrote a book on her findings. Fenn definitely thinks Generation Y***, has a different approach to business. She was struck by their intense team work. They start companies with friends, draw upon teachers, parents, older entrepreneurs and are never afraid to admit they don’t know and they ask for help.

Do you think that young entrepreneurs have an advantage over seasoned entrepreneurs?

Interested in Donna Fenn’s book? It is called Upstarts! How GenY Entrepreneurs are rocking the world of business and 8 ways you can profit from their success.

*** Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation or Generation Next or Net Generation, describes the demographic cohort following Generation X. Its members are often referred to as Millennials or Echo Boomers. As there are no precise dates for when the Millennial generation starts and ends, commentators have used birth dates ranging somewhere from the mid 1970s to the early 2000s. This generation generally represents an increase in births from the 1960s and 70s, not because of a significant increase in birthrates, but because the large cohort of baby boomers began to have children. The 20th century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued, however, so the relative impact of the “baby boom echo” was generally less pronounced than the original boom.