An Op-Ed from Morgen Culver, Vevue Community Manager
Come with me to the year 2003. It is a desolate time of spotty cell phone coverage and dial-up internet. Arnold Swarzenegger is the newly elected Governor of California, and the world is fanboying all over the second Matrix film as it embraces this brave new (technological) world. My 17-year-old self is manning the snack bar at a non-descript family fun center in a non-descript town in Eastern Pennsylvania, my first real job. I am a true millennial, and life is uncomplicated. My friends can call me on my shiny, pink flip-phone, we loiter at the mall on weekends, and my mom still does my laundry. But times, they were a-changing. After the world recovered from the laughable threat of Y2K and stopped clutching their collective pearls, people began to embrace the opportunities technology enabled rather than running from them. But to be a teenager on the brink of adulthood in the early aughts was a very sobering experience. Arguably, the graduating high school class of 2004 existed in the no man’s land between conflicting expectations. We were waving good-bye to the era of corporate ladders, career nepotism, and professional hand-holding and entering the epoch of entrepreneurship. We were a generation torn between two ideas of what constituted a successful and socially acceptable career, and for many of us, myself included, it was hard to get your bearings when the job market was being remodeled and flipped, like a gentrified crack house, right before your eyes.
Of course, none of this should have come as a shock. I grew up in a house of entrepreneurs; my father founded his own computer-based training company when I was in elementary school and ran it out of our basement. He employed my mom, who quit her stable and successful job at a national bank. Eventually, she too would start her own business by opening up a jewelry store. Even my brother, at the ripe old age of 16, armed with only an idea and a heat press, designed and launched his own line of athletic T-shirts, selling them in many local stores. But despite the do-or-die role models in my life, I still existed in a world where the typical entrepreneur was someone who had paid their dues, worked their way up until they reached the lonely top (or left smudged fingerprints on the glass ceiling), and decided to re-mortgage their house, risk their children’s college funds, and branch out on their own.
In the early 2000s, almost no one was an entrepreneur under the age of 40.
Collectively, my generation was conditioned to believe that any opportunity or advancement was at the discretion of someone else. You may have dreams and ambitions, but someone else was guarding all the doors and holding all the keys (as Morpheus would say). So a year later, when it came time for me to settle on a college major, I decided to be sensible and parlay my fascination with balancing chemical equations into a stable career. I entered my freshman year of college as a molecular biology major. Armed with a TI-83 and a general sense of electron valances, I slept well on the knowledge that my future in a very niche market would most likely come with a guarantee of employment. No struggling artist for me, no sir.
A year later, when a group of Harvard students invented a social media platform and a group of Stanford grads were pioneering search engines, a seismic shift rippled through the experience of every millennial, giving most of them some sort of existential crisis. Suddenly the idea of working for yourself at a young age, of not needing permission to be successful, became a real possibility. People were creating and inventing with reckless abandon. From hip co-working spaces to their parent’s moldy basements, millennials everywhere began breezing right past the bouncer at the door of opportunity. They didn’t care if their name was on the list because, suddenly, there was no list. At my preppy liberal arts college, stocked with the affluent successors to business empires and legal firms, the change was felt most acutely. Many of my friends, who viewed college as their last chance to binge drink and play Frisbee before joining the family business, and who had previously majored in history, philosophy, or Latin, suddenly decided to exchange their nepotistic, pre-packaged life for computer programming, marketing, and finance. Some of them, in pursuit of the “next big thing,” dropped out all together. They understood way before I did that things had irrevocably changed in the job market.
I, on the other hand, was getting my butt handed to me by stoichiometry, and I decided to swim against the current and retreat to the English department. I can tell you first hand that knowing Hamlet’s soliloquy in a flawless Scottish brogue is a great party trick but doesn’t open many doors in business. I had come to realize, a bit too late, that though I existed in the “in-between” I was still a product of the previous generation. And as my friends went on to take big risks, and often received big rewards, I was left wondering where I belonged in this exciting new era. Would I return to that snack bar in my hometown and dunk carbohydrates into crackling vats of oil for the rest of my life? I not only missed the boat, but I was also surrounded by peers who had the foresight to build their own boat, or better yet, a bridge, or even grander still, an eco-friendly way to drain the water, purify it and relocate it to struggling third world countries.
Although I was a late bloomer in the realm of entrepreneurship, it will relieve you, dear reader, to know that I eventually found my place. After college, I decided to go against my personal inclinations, firmly grasp that steering wheel, and lean into the skid, as it were. And, having come out the other side relatively unscathed, I can only marvel at this new age. Generation Z has so effortlessly taken up where millennials left off and sutured whatever gaps remained, without all the gnashing of teeth that was so characteristic of my time.
Children as young as 5 have successfully founded and run their own businesses, everything from socks to online game development.
And taking a page out of the younger generation’s book, more Americans over the age of 50 are becoming entrepreneurs than ever before. Looking back on how we, as a society, arrived here is cathartic somehow, and, like any avid reader, I can’t help but skip to the end of the Generation Z story, only to be greeted by the words: To Be Continued — Generation Alpha.
