Nobody wants to hear your good ideas. At least that’s what startup owner and Des Moines chapter president of One Million Cups, Ben McDougal has to say. “In my years as an investor and entrepreneur, I don’t care about your good idea. I care about how you can get it done”.
In an age when colleges and universities have majors like business management and entrepreneurship, schools are emphasizing a student’s ability to graduate and start their own business instead of beginning on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder. Business owners and CEOs are becoming younger and younger. A recent study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shows that more than 2,100 universities have added an entrepreneurship program to their curriculum. In an attempt to support the millenials’ wish to trailblaze their own path, many schools offer grants and competitions to get them there, as millennials are becoming younger and hungrier.
Ben McDougal is also the CEO and founder of FliteBrite, an app that allows users to track and rate craft beer at festivals and bars. After having one too many brews during a night out and not being able to pick out the ones he liked best, he decided it was time to act. It started as a physical paddle beer flights were served on that displayed a beer profile on a digital screen. They soon realized production for this was out of their price range and brought in some developers to get to work on the app.
He then went on to start the Des Moines chapter of One Million Cups, a national organization that hosts weekly innovation meetings where business owners, current and prospective, can meet and bounce ideas off each other, network and present new business ideas. “Being an entrepreneur is a lonely road, you need to recognize the value of plugging in to a community and surround yourself with fellow entrepreneurs who understand what that life is like”, he says. This sort of camaraderie is put in place to encourage, not discourage young people to work together and elevate each other’s projects.
Organizations like One Million Cups specifically target recent college graduates and people who genuinely want to support other young business owners - something they’re using to their advantage. “We want 1MC to be a welcoming environment for entrepreneurs, and a place where they can come for support and networking opportunities to elevate their businesses,” McDougal says. “There is no need for hostility here”.
In 2011 alone, millennials launched almost 160,000 startups each month - the average age of these entrepreneurs being 27 years-old. In an environment that may be more competitive with younger and hungrier business tycoons at every corner, there are more resources to match.
Where older business owners had networking events and cold calls to reach out to investors or possible business partners, millennials have the whole world at their fingertips. LinkedIn. Social media. Online entrepreneurship boards. Self-promotion has never been easier, so accessing the people you want to see your work, your business or your next great invention is just at the click of a button.
Whether or not being an influencer is something you want to put on your resume, racking up business social media, and personal accounts is easier to do today, and more accessible to put whatever you’re selling, making or distributing into the public’s eye. Universities have even started implementing courses focused on social media management and digital media strategies to make their work more efficient.
Emily Steele, a Drake University alum is an entrepreneur in the Des Moines area and has founded three companies since her graduation. In her words, she is a social creature. Defined by the Enneagram test, a personality test that gives nine different sets of personality types, she is an enthusiast. Someone who enthuses others and is a strong presence of joy.
Steele, the president of FemCity’s Des Moines chapter, a national organization with individual chapters and groups of women that work to elevate each other and their professional endeavors. The Des Moines branch is the fastest growing chapter of the company, “It was basically handed to me by the last president with fifteen or so members, and within a year we hit five hundred”. Steele’s career is focused on taking existing brands and elevating them to the next level.
The five hundred Des Moines members all take advantage of their social media opportunities to foster connections in the community. With a young leader like Steele, they see someone who, like she identifies, lives in a digital world, “My job is literally brand perception and management. It helps that we’re all supporting women who are focused on building each other up, not on hostility. I’ve learned that the chamber of commerce is in danger if it doesn’t make it on to the digital world”.
Some live in the digital world, some create it. Brad Dwyer, software developer and businessman, developed and launched a successful mobile game, Hatchlings, during his sophomore year at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. To make matters more impressive, this was after he started, and sold, a separate company the year before.
In an interview with Silicon Prairie News, he describes the game as a mix between ‘Where’s Waldo’, but for Easter Eggs. Realizing the world was moving in a more digital direction, decided the game should be Facebook-based, and was marketed as an individual user-friendly game where users can watch each other’s scores change – starting what we know now as an online community.
More companies and businesses are looking into implementing and creating an online community separate from the products or services they sell/produce. Payson Wick, founder of Kanju Media, a media production company in Des Moines agrees that the world is becoming more and more digital – he took the reins into his own hands as he started Kanju Media.
“As an entrepreneurship student, I was constantly looking for various business ideas and I saw the future of media being video,” Wick says. “I realized I could become an expert by learning things from the internet through trial and error if I maintained an objective opinion on my videos.” Using the entrepreneurship classes he took away from Drake University and the drive to do it on his own, not having any digital media production background, he began the company during his senior year.
He sees being younger as an advantage – a chance to break through the mold that ‘this is how it works in the world so this is how we have to do it’. Convenient enough – his education gave him the tools to seek out those opportunities. “My education helped me understand how to craft videos in a way that will make [my audience] feel something about a product, service or organization rather than just telling them things about it”.
With majors and minors to help students launch businesses of their own, blaze their own trail or just step into an initial meeting more confidently, higher education systems are preparing millennial college students to take on life after graduation. In agreement with Ben McDougal, Wick says, “The only thing holding you back from doing something is your fear that your age makes your ideas invalid”.
Xoxo,
S
Samantha Miller (@samantharachelmiller) is a freelance writer from Chicago. She prides herself on her occasional wit, her keen eye for design and her undying love for iced almond milk lattes.Follow Samantha Miller's work on Linkedin, and sign up for updates on her blog.
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