Before Joe Liemandt could defy the slacker stereotype of his generation, he had to confront his tough-minded father. Joe was dropping out of Stanford University, just a few months from graduation, to start his own software company. “Can’t you wait a few months?” his father pleaded. “No,” Joe said. “In software, being first is everything.” “You’re a moron,” his father growled. He knew that businesses often fail and that employers rarely hire kids without college degrees. Joe spent the next three years writing computer programs with five classmates in a small rented office near campus. No one would finance the start-up company, which Joe called Trilogy Development Group. Banks turned him down. Venture capitalists explained that he must have experienced managers and veteran engineers. Joe had neither. “See ya later, kid,” they said. Joe and his five partners kept working on the software, which promised to revolutionize the purchasing process for major corporations. When it was finished, he tried to sell the program. No one took the young entrepreneur seriously. Finally, Joe persuaded Hewlett-Packard’s engineers to test it. Hewlett- Packard was so impressed that it ultimately paid Trilogy $3 million to use the program. Soon, orders from Fortune 500 companies flooded in. Today, Trilogy has some 300 employees in its Austin, Texas, headquarters. Annual revenues are expected to top $120 million this year. Trilogy’s customers include Chrysler, IBM, AT&T and Boeing. The room for growth is large. “It’s a $10 billion market,” Joe says. Joe Liemandt is only one of growing numbers of young entrepreneurs who are challenging the popular image of the so-called Generation X. The press paints Generation X as an angry group of slackers who hate work and authority. It couldn’t be more wrong. Generation X ought to be called Generation E (E for entrepreneurial) because it is starting a record number of new businesses. Those born between 1961 and 1981 are starting businesses at younger ages and in greater numbers than their predecessors. One out of every five small-business owners in America is between the ages of 25 and 34, according to a 1996 report by the federal Small Business Administration. Another 10 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 are actively involved in starting their own business – about three times as high as any other age group, according to a 1995 Babson College study. Interest in entrepreneurship has never been higher. The number of universities that provide degree programs for entrepreneurs has grown to more than 400 today, up from just 16 in 1970. There are some 171 endowed chairs of entrepreneurship, nine times the number in 1980. Why the surge in entrepreneurship? “They’ve seen the layoffs at the big corporations and asked themselves ‘Is that what I really want to do?'” says Richard Bright, director of marketing for Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization, which is based in Alexandria, Va. The critics are wrong about the younger generation’s politics, too. Seventy-eight percent of people aged 18 to 24 disagreed with the statement: “Government can generally be trusted to look after our interests,” according to a recent survey by Louis Harris And Associates Inc. “Twice as many young people would rather own their own businesses than be a top executive of a large company, and four times as many said they would rather own their own business than hold an important position in politics or government,” writes American Enterprise Institute scholar Karlyn Bowman. Bowman calls this “a new ethic of self-reliance.” Whatever you call it, this generation is going to continue to surprise its elders.
Richard Miniter is executive producer of “Enterprising Women,” a weekly radio series that profiles women entrepreneurs.
