RISKY BIZ > Busting:: The Myth of The Millenial Entrepeneur



Whatever happened to that illusion of Hope & Change?

Future SHOCK is now here if you just open your eyes.

Capitalistic democracy is morphing into a Neo-Feudal Serfdom where 62 people control the wealth of world economies in uncertain forces of creation and destruction.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are more likely pipe dreams easily extinguished in the over-heated fog of smoke-and-mirrors gamesmanship of politics, proxy wars and roiling roller-coaster market data on a zigzag downward slope uncertain in its outcomes. The only certain thing is more uncertainty to create new visions and pathways into a brave new world by anyone of any age. 

Young people very well may lead the country in entrepreneurship, as a mentality. But when it comes to the more falsifiable measure of entrepreneurship as an activity, older generations are doing most of the work. The average age for a successful startup-founder is about 40 years old, according to the Kauffman Foundation, a think tank focused on education and entrepreneurship. (In their words, one’s 40s are the “peak age for business formation.”) 
The reality is that the typical American entrepreneur isn’t that hover-boarding kid in a hoodie; it’s his mom or dad. In fact, the only age group with rising entrepreneurial activity in the last two decades is people between 55 and 65.

The Myth of the Millennial Entrepreneur

The generation cheered for its start-up mentality is actually starting companies at the lowest rate in 25 years. Why?

Derek Thompson July 6, 2016 in The Atlantic

So, why hasn't Millennial entrepreneurship kept pace with either media expectations or past generations?
The answer begins with more debt and less risk-taking.
The rarity of Millennial entrepreneurs doesn't just deflate a common media myth—it could have lasting consequences for the competitiveness of the American economy.

Although venture-capital investment has grown in the last decade, the majority of “startups” are really what most people consider “small businesses.” A new bodega, coffee shop, or small construction firm doesn’t seem like a radical act of innovation. But the government considers such companies to be startups, and they’re getting rarer as a handful of large firms dominate each sector of the U.S. economy. Three drug stores—CVS, Walgreen's, and Rite Aid—own 99 percent of the national market. Two companies—Amazon and Barnes & Noble—sell half of the country's books.
If it is not quite a new Gilded Age for America’s monopolies, it is certainly a new dawn for its oligopolies.

That’s a problem, because an economy dominated by older firms tends to be less efficient. Companies that are 10 or more years old now account for nearly half of all firms and employ more than 80 percent of workers; both of those figures are up more than 10 percentage points since 1990. The growth of these industrial giants has squeezed out smaller competitors. Even in tech, the sector synonymous with innovation, the frontier is closing. Facebook owns four of the five most downloaded apps—Whatsapp, Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram. It tried to buy the other, Snapchat. All of the 20 most downloaded apps, including Uber, Spotify, and Pinterest, were founded since 2012, according to Nomura research.
The media portrayal of young people casting off the shackles of employment to start their own companies is, for now, an illusion.