Each year Inc.com runs a story on 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30. In her story on this year's 30 under 30, Donna Fenn presents an impressive roster from the Entrepreneurial Generation. I had the pleasure of talking with her about the young entrepreneurs of today for this story.
No wonder that a recent study by The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor shows that 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States are starting businesses at a faster rate than 35- to 44-year-olds. The college campus is now a fertile breeding ground for company builders. "Forty percent or more of students who come into our undergraduate entrepreneurship program as freshmen already have a business," says Jeff Cornwall, the Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville. "It's a whole new world...."They're often so antsy, in fact, that it's not unusual for them to bail out of college to devote themselves to their businesses full time....[T]hat kind of defection may tell us something about entrepreneurship education. "The old model was, go off and study liberal arts and when you're a junior, we'll give you an entrepreneurship course," Cornwall says. "Now, if I wait until junior year, I'll loose them. They want fulfillment and success and they're not willing to wait 10 or 15 years. They want it today."
