My 10 year old has started asking questions about what she should study when she goes to college. She's about eight years away from needing to declare a major, but the fact that this is on her radar screen is troubling. This follows her recent idea of posting flyers around our home offering her "legal services" at $2 a pop. She's already realized she's got keen negotiating skills and eager to capitalize on them. She just needs to find an audience…I refuse to pay her when I'm the one she is negotiating with.
And today during an offsite meeting, one of my colleagues shared an email that his 10 year old niece had just sent him; she was requesting his help on a business plan - yes, a business plan, she and her girlfriend were creating for a cupcake business they were attempting to start.
I didn't know whether to be excited or frightened at the motivation of these kids. When I was 10, the extent of the planning I was doing was plotting out how long it would take me to read and then execute my book report on some Nancy Drew mystery. The thought of starting a non-lemonade stand business would have never have been on my radar screen. And yet, that appears to be within the realm of reality of these children these days.
"Kids" like 26 year old CEO of Quirky, Ben Kaufman, has raised over $90 million in funding for his online community that votes on invention ideas and then finances manufacturing and distribution for the winners. Amit Kleinberger, 32, runs a chain of 230 frozen yogurt shops under the name "Menchie's Frozen Yogurt." And of course, there is 29 year old Alexa Von Tobel, an HBS dropout who is the founder and CEO of Learnvest and killing it with a model to bring financial planning to the masses. No matter how you look at it, It's pretty awesome.
I'm not shocked by the stories of their successes. I was raised around environments like this. My dad and his fraternity brothers chose to build their own company out of graduate school rather than work for someone else, and they never looked back. The first company I interned at went public weeks into my time there. And the first company I played a senior role in was run by two guys in their twenties…the whole leadership team was. None of that ever seemed odd to me. What strikes me as extraordinary about it todays world is how much press these younger-than-the-previous-norm CEOs are getting these days for their extraordinary stories of success. And how many more of them their seem to be.
Bill Gates and Larry Ellison spent years building their organizations to scale before hitting their incredible success. Steve Jobs had a Hollywood-like story of accomplishment, failure and then exceptional redemption again. And yet we see barely-out-of-school youth like Mark Zuckerberg and David Karp doing amazing things with disruptive businesses and incredible payouts.
So what will happen with our kids? Will the desire to attend college be obsolete by the time they get there? Will it be so cost prohibitive that that question almost becomes irrelevant? Will their heroes be pre-pubescent titans of industry rather than rock stars like mine were at their age?
It will be interesting to see how our business world evolves, and the role of younger people within it. And lookout world…there may be two more mini-moguls honing their skills right under our noses in these two 10 year old girls.
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