For Young Entrepreneurs, Safety in Numbers
Despite the economic gloom and doom, the honorees on this year's 30 Under 30 list are building wildly successful ventures with the help of their peers, parents, professors, and patrons.
Recession? What recession? You'd think the events of the past year would have curbed Generation Y's enthusiasm for the always-uncertain entrepreneurial life, but you'd never know it by looking at this year's 30 Under 30 list. It's a dynamic group of self-starters that has managed to raise money, launch new products, build new technologies, and tap into underserved markets. And they've done it with relentless enthusiasm and resiliency.
But they haven't done it alone. Take at look at our list, and one of the first things you'll notice is an astounding number of partners (Getting By with a Little Help from Their Friends). They're starting companies with college pals (Thrillist, Apture, Foodzie, and Smathers & Branson), spouses (ModCloth), or siblings (DANNIJO, M3 Girl Designs), and that should probably come as no surprise since GenY is typically characterized as a very social generation -- they are, by and large, comfortable with teamwork and collaboration.
Dig a little beneath the surface, however, and you'll find that their tendency to start companies with partners is just the most obvious and visible element of this generation's entrepreneurial zeitgeist. First and foremost, they are tribe-builders. By that, we mean that they seem to have an innate talent, and an almost compulsive desire, to draw others into their entrepreneurial orbits and to continually extract from them wisdom and advice. Parents, professors, mentors, investors, and complete strangers are all invested in the success of these companies. No arm-twisting required. After all, who doesn't want even the tiniest role in an entrepreneurial success story?
For many young entrepreneurs, the tribe of support begins forming very close to home. Their baby boomer parents -- increasingly disillusioned with corporate life, yet eager to help launch their children on paths to success -- are probably more supportive of entrepreneurial dreams than any other generation of parents in modern times. When Maddie Bradshaw, the 13-year-old founder of M3 Girl Designs, came up with the idea to make and sell hand-painted bottle-cap necklaces, her mom gave her the thumbs up to spend $300 of birthday and tooth fairy money to start the venture. M3 is now a $1.6 million company with products in hundreds of stores. The three "M"s in the company name stand for Mom (the adult signature on all the corporate documents), Maddie (founder, president, and head designer), and nine-year old Margot, (vice president and assistant designer).
Then there's Jamail Larkins, whose parents encouraged his love of aviation but insisted he help finance his passion for flying. So Larkins, who flew solo in Canada at age 14, sold aviation training books and videos to earn money for lessons. Now, in addition to being a skilled acrobatic pilot, he's the CEO of Ascension Aircraft, a nearly $6 million firm that sells and leases airplanes. At 25 years old.
While we're noticing an increasing number of young entrepreneurs who moved beyond the lemonade stand at shockingly young ages, like Bradshaw and Larkins, college still seems to be the incubator of choice for a good many GenY business owners. And why not? There's no better place to build a tribe. John Goscha, Jeff Avalon, and Morgan Newman cut their entrepreneurial teeth as freshman living in Babson College's E-Tower dorm for entrepreneurs, where idea generation apparently beats beer pong as a favored extracurricular activity. For the three friends, the very process of brainstorming led to a pretty good idea: frustrated with the limited space on whiteboards and with chore of tacking giant pieces of paper to the wall, they invented IdeaPaint, which turns any paintable surface into a dry-erase board. The three even signed on two Babson professors as investors.
Meanwhile, Stanford grad-school classmates Tristan Harris, Can Sar, and Jesse Young tapped into the university's John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists for advice on a technology tool they were developing for publishers and bloggers. Based on feedback from the journalists on the kinds of Web-based features they'd most appreciate, the three developed Apture, a plug-in that allows readers to view multimedia links without leaving a website. One of the Knight Fellows introduced the Apture team to an executive editor at The Washington Post, and the paper ultimately became a customer.
At Bowdoin, roommates Peter Smathers and Austin Branson were so smitten with the needlepoint belts made by their girlfriends, that they decided to start a business selling them. Not knowing quite where to start, they drew on the Maine college's resources by pitching a joint independent study project to both the art and economics departments. It was accepted, and the two got a crash course in both design and business planning. Their needlepoint belts and accessories, made by more than 1,500 independent contractors in 16 Vietnamese villages, now generate $2.5 million in revenue.
Since being featured on our 30 Under 30 list, Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer sold his company for $170 million, College Hunks Hauling Junk founders Nick Friedman and Omar Soliman faced off with investors on national TV, and Phreesia founders Chaim Indig and Evan Roberts raised close to $12 million in venture capital. How are some of our other previous honorees faring? We asked them to share the latest developments about themselves and their companies. Here's what they had to say.
