Why Internet Company Has More Young People Than company in Other Industries

I lived in both east coast and west coast. There is a big difference between cities such as San Francisco and Boston, San Jose and Chicago, Seattle and Washington. East coast is more business formal, filled with traditional companies and financial institutions such as Bank of America, United Airlines, AT&T, etc. East coast is more casual, dominated by companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber, and so on.

I find an interesting thing that more young people work for internet companies than for traditional ones. Well it’s kind of obvious, but I start wondering why.

There are probably three explanations:

(1) Learning knowledge is for more efficient than before thanks to the internet. In the old days, a person who wants to be an expert in some areas need to find a mentor, spend years of learning, and then starting doing his own practices. In today’s world, learning knowledge or a skill is much more easier than ever before. You can google it, watch free courses online, or watch youtube. This dramatically shortens people’s learning process. So we see a young person, even without going to university, can work effectively as a software engineer.

(2) Cost of doing business, especially doing internet business, is incredibly lower than before, so is cost of failure. This allows more trial and run, more experiments. Lower cost of experimenting and bigger tolerance for failure fundamentally allows people start doing things easier. Think about becoming a software product manager and becoming a doctor. You can write your code and design your product on your own computer. If it doesn’t work, simply do that again. Any college student actually can start his own business. But you cannot start seeing patients right after school. The cost of failure is huge. Therefore, people spend years of training before doing practice in the field. By the time you’re ready, you are already 35.

(3)Go-to-Market becomes easier for internet companies, especially for B-to-C. A big part of go-to-market is channel. Think of selling TV or selling drugs. You need marketing people to put together a campaign, business development people to build relationship, supply chain people to ensure you can deliver product to customers. All those things need lots of experience and time to build, especially build business relationship with your partners. But in internet age, channel basically disappres. Internet is great at delivering products to millions of users immediately. That’s why you don’t need a lot of grey hair people.

I think the implications of this situation is people need to think about how they can add value to the business and how they can play their strengths.

Think about the business, think about the product and think about how your experience, your degree and your skills can help business and product win. If you have several business development or sales experience in auto industry, then going to a similar role in pharm industry is probably better than going to a B to C internet company. In pharm industry, sales cycle is long, relationship really matters, customer are hard to deal with. That’s not a job that a young college graduate can easily deal with. Your experience of interacting with customers is well positioned.