Pre financial collapse, in business school, a professor told me that our generation's employment would more diversified than any generation prior. "Many of you will not be with the same company for 35 years," he said. "Rather, you will simultaneously work at about 5 different places. A day at one job, the next someplace else, volunteer on Sundays, and spend a night or two a week working part time for a different organization." He could not have been more correct if he were predicting the trajectory of my immediate post-collegiate life. I'd go as far as saying that his words ring true in our other behaviors, too. The last time you searched the internet for any one thing, how many other pages did you wind up opening in your browser? I don't remember this occurring seven years ago, in the pre app era. But I digress.
I was reading an article entitled "How San Francisco's new entrepreneurial culture is changing the country," by Nathan Heller, and it made me think back to professor's forecast. If you read it, you'll find out why:
In recent years, San Francisco has become the capital of what someone described to me as the "three-business-card life." People might give a lot of their time to one startup while keeping a substantial equity share, and maybe a nominal job title, in one or two others that are just getting off the ground. They might help fund-raise for one company while investing in another one. Entrepreneurialism is a high-failure business, the thinking goes, but if you keep a few pots on the burner sooner or later something will boil. They can live off that payoff for a while or invest in in other things. ...young and urban and professionally diffused [people] tend to regard success in terms of autonomy -- designing your life as you want -- rather than Napoleonic domination.
The ecosystem used to funnel lots of talented people into a few clear winners. Now it's funnelling lots of talented people into lots of experiments. Why be Gordon Gekko when you could make enough to have a nice place and go paleo on local greens -- and then take a day or two off to cycle out to Stinson Beach? Isn't that freedom more distinguishing than cash or a CEO title, which everybody [in the San Francisco tech industry] has access to? SF's young entrepreneurs appear less concerned about flaunting their earnings than about showing that they can act imaginatively, with conspicuously noble ethics.
"The word 'entrepreneur' has undergone a redefinition," Ben Casnocha told me over lunch one day at LinkedIn's Mountain View campus, down the road from Google. "For a while, it was like you're either running the laundromat or the coffee shop, or you're trying to create the next Apple. But there's been a whole flourishing of people who are starting different kinds of businesses -- who are having pride in small business that gives them autonomy." It is difficult to say what Casnocha's job is, it is easy to see that he does it well. He writes books about the entrepreneurial life style (1). He sits on the board of Comcate, a company that helps local governments streamline their compliant responses (2). He runs a speaking series (3), and a salon (4). And he is the "chief of staff" to Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn (5).
Nice post!
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