What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [102]
As investments get smaller, entrepreneurs are also getting younger. Many of web 2.0’s explosive new companies—Facebook and Digg, to name two—were started by people in their 20s. “The most interesting things I’ve seen this month and this year are the creations of kids who barely shave,” Wilson blogged. This, he argued, is no accident. “It is incredibly hard to think of new paradigms when you’ve grown up reading the newspaper every morning. But we have a generation coming of age right now that has never relied on newspapers, TV, and magazines for their information and entertainment. They are the net natives. They grew up in AOL chatrooms, IMing with their friends for hours after dinner, and went to school with a Facebook login. The internet is their medium and they are showing us how it needs to be used.” They are helping to build what the internet is becoming, which is what Wilson wants to invest in.
That blog post irked a bunch of entrepreneurs my age (hint: my beard is gray). But Clay Shirky defended Wilson’s thesis on youth, arguing, “The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things. In almost every other circumstance, this would be a disadvantage, but not here, and not now…. When the world really has changed overnight, when wild new things are possible if you don’t have any sense of how things used to be, then it is the people who got here five minutes ago who understand that new possibility, and they understand it precisely because, to them, it isn’t new.”
Shirky speaks for my generation when he says he knows from experience that you find music in stores, try on pants before you buy them, and get news and jobs reading newspapers. “I’ve had to unlearn every one of those things and a million others. This makes me a not-bad analyst, because I have to explain new technology to myself first—I’m too old to understand it natively. But it makes me a lousy entrepreneur.”
Wilson responded to the fuss saying that he was not an ageist, only that he and his partners were seeing more and more young people with new ideas. “This is 15-to 20-year-old kids building and launching authentic web services that fill a real need in the market.” As he blogged that, he linked to a web site run by my son, Jake, who was 15 at the time and had just written and sold a few Facebook applications, one of them to another venture firm. On a trip to Union Square’s offices, after Wilson and his partners quizzed Jake about his net-native worldview, he advised Jake to find a technology mentor and suggested David Karp, who created the tool Tumblr (a Union Square investment). Wilson warned me that Karp had left high school to start his company. High school. (My wife to our son: “Don’t you even think of it!”)
How do investors meet entrepreneurs from a different generation? I think they need to operate in more open networks with more stakeholders at the edges. VCs are still a chokepoint of control: They raise money from investors; they pick and manage relationships with start-ups; they pay investors and keep their share. They are middlemen and Google makes detours around middlemen. As VCs are stretched thin—making more and smaller investments—it’s harder for them to stay in the middle. It’s also harder to find and evaluate new companies. I get a headache reading the popular blog TechCrunch, which covers new web 2.0 companies, because I can’t hope to keep track of them all: mobile companies, social companies, companies dedicated just to managing blog comments. The low cost of launching and running new enterprises means they can serve niche needs in a small-is-the-new-big age. But the barrier to entry to competitors