The Next Generation

Profile of the 30 Inc. 500 CEOs who are 30 or younger.

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The 30 Inc. 500 CEOs who are 30 or younger are different from their older colleagues. Their claim: the younger you are the better whenit comes to starting a company

Most people who eventually start successful businesses travel a familiar path. They set off after college to get their feet wet in corporate America. Then after a decade or so at other companies, they go off on their own. To one degree or another, the businesses these men and women start are shaped by their experiences. But recently, we've noticed a new wave of businesses begun not by veterans but by brazen young people with no claims to any experience.

It's hard to quantify the phenomenon -- we know of no numbers. But individuals who are in good positions to track this activity (college career counselors, for instance) say a new, more virulent strain of start-up fever has been striking college students and other young adults since the late 1980s, when many big companies began closing doors on entry-level hiring and lopping off tens of thousands from their work forces. With all the concern about how problematic it can be to survive and flourish in established organizations, starting one's own business has emerged as an appealing option, says Marcia Harris, director of career-development services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Young people are saying, 'If we can't count on someone else, we'll hire ourselves.' " For the first time, we're seeing the ripples of this trend in the Inc. 500; this year, 30 company founders (29 men and one woman) are 30 years old or younger, which means most of them began their businesses before their 25th birthdays.

A few, it seems, were born to start companies. Ben Narasin of Boston Preparatory (#416) has been fixated on the notion since childhood, when he watched his father go off to work at IBM. An entrepreneurial-studies major at Babson College, Narasin, now 27, wrote the original business plan for his men's-sportswear-manufacturing business as his senior thesis. And that was after he'd already had a string of other money-making endeavors.

Narasin, however, isn't really typical. Others, rather than organize their lives to become entrepreneurs, studied political science, premed, or art history (three skipped college altogether), and became company founders more accidentally. Jack Mayes of Cardboard Gold (#74) dropped out of the University of California at Irvine, and after striking out selling baseball cards, shifted into selling paraphernalia for baseball-card collectors. Yvonne Cucci of Cucci International (#474) began by printing T-shirts for her father's boat business as an alternative to taking a sales job at the local mall. And Bud Prentice of Applied Computer Technology (#257) spent part of his spare time while a student at Colorado State assembling low-cost personal computers for a widening circle of friends. Only after these founders had been at it awhile did it dawn on them that, lo and behold, they had "businesses."

Getting a business off the ground can be intimidating at 22 or 23. "People had a hard time taking me seriously," recalls Prentice, now 28, echoing others' comments. "A supplier once asked me, 'Where are your parents?' " For many of these founders, a big hurdle was money. Since few of them had personal savings or collateral to borrow against ("What was the bank going to take, our stereos?" asks John Chuang of MacTemps [#12]), there were generally two options: being crafty at bootstrapping, as were Geoff Snelling and Marc Greenberg of Small Systems Management (#223), who started their business on $460 each; or convincing family members that the business was a decent investment. More than a quarter were able to do the latter. Those who managed to get bank loans almost always had to get parents to cosign.

Yet this group doesn't hold grudges against skeptics who may have brushed them off. Memories of doubting bankers and customers have for the most part faded. What you hear now is that one's twenties are really the best time of all to launch a business.

Practically everyone talks about the personal aspects of starting a business while relatively young. Without families or other constraints, these entrepreneurs were free to work 80-hour weeks without worrying about being late for supper or missing Little League games. Living in cheap apartments with roommates -- or, as in the case of Michael Levin of Cadapult Graphic Systems (#72), at home with parents -- they could keep overhead costs low. And if the business fizzled, when else in their lives would they be in as good a position to pick up the pieces? "The worst thing that would happen," figured Bob Roscoe of MBS Communications (#368), "was that I'd have to go out and get a job like other people."

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