Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin When I went to college in the early 1990s—long before the iPhone, internet, social media, and OpenAI—no one really aspired to be a “start-up founder”, at least not the way that we think of them today. Back then, university graduates with an entrepreneurial, type-A mindset mostly became corporate lawyers, bankers, or doctors, or, at best, a big wig CEO. The rest of us who never saw that kind of life for ourselves usually became teachers, scientists, artists, or (gasp!) writers.
Barely two decades ago, few college graduates left school intending to be a "start-up founder". Now, ..
. [+] millions do. Much has changed across the start-up landscape since.
Tech can take a lot of credit for those transformations, reducing the age barrier to entry, hyper-driving time to liquidity, minting dozens of celebrity billionaires under 30, and making it perfectly acceptable to dress down the C-suite in Crocs and a Jimi Hendrix tee shirt. Billions in venture capital sloshing around haven’t hurt either. Yet, more generationally profound has been the extent to which raising a Series D round is now almost as cool as being Taylor Swift’s drummer.
Not surprisingly, many twenty-somethings and soon-to-be-graduates I speak with today are hellbent to launch their own start-up, sprint towards an IPO, and retire early versus growing their 401k the old-fashioned way. The lionization of start-up culture has transformed being a founder into 'dr.