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HelpNew Kid on the Block Blog: A Millennial in the Startup World
From our Boomset Team Series, sales intern Mackenzie shares her thoughts on millennials and start up life in this excellent and informative post.
Image via Enterra Solutions
A bright-eyed millennial, entering the workforce with optimism and confidence. Exhibits all the classic generational qualities: sure-footed in her abilities and ideas, tech-savvy, eager to participate. Also suffers from the classic “Millennial” setbacks: TOO eager to participate, TOO confident, TOO early, TOO self-centered to be a successful entry-level professional.
However, despite all these criticisms, we are supposed to be the world-changing generation. The revolutionaries. Saving the world from the energy crisis, poverty, and climate change with the power of our very-different-from-our-parents’ ideas.
Are the criticisms of the Millennials valid?
Certainly. I’ll admit that with no hesitation. Rather than blaming us for our faults, however, the past few years have shown an incredible shift in the workforce–older generations are beginning to regard us for our strengths, rather than criticize us for our weaknesses.
A representation of this shift in perception is the tremendous growth of the technology startup world across the globe, and notably, here in NYC, where Boomset is based. After the Financial Crisis of 2008, ex-mayor of NYC Michael Bloomberg began a big push to distribute the city’s focus more evenly across other industries, effectively reducing NYC’s dependence on Wall Street.
NYC’s startup culture grew quickly into the second largest in the country, due not only to Bloomberg’s push but also because the innovative tech companies here in New York took advantage of the city’s broad-reaching network of industry. By creating applications that work to apply innovative solutions for popular industries in NYC like advertising or banking, for example, startups have solidified their importance here on the East Coast.
Image via Pontiflex
Enter Boomset, one of these innovative apps developed with a clear industry target in mind: event planning and production. Boomset, as well as the other blossoming tech startups in NYC, owes its success not only to an awesome product and innovative thinking–but also a growing market that was ready to move away from pen-and-paper crowd management and time wasted searching needle-in-a-haystack-style in a sea of nametags.
And what does the startup industry’s growth have to do with us Millennials?
We are, by and large, the work force contributing the most human capital to the burgeoning startup industry. Payscale’s (another one of those innovative tech companies) median age reports most recently showed this fact–where the American workforce’s median age is 42.3…the companies that report the lowest median age are in the tech industry (Facebook, for example, has a median age of 28).
Why this relationship between the youngsters in the workforce and the tech industry?
I see it as a natural pairing: put the energetic (willing to spend more than the classic 40 hours a week in the office if it means a better payoff), tech-worshipping, normal “workplace” eschewing generation to work in this growing industry with space for “revolutionary” products. After all, isn’t that what us Millennials are destined to do?
The startup industry and the Millennials are a match made in heavenly cyberspace– and I count myself lucky to be experiencing the current tech revolution firsthand with the awesome team at Boomset by my side!
Sources: New York Times, SAP, BizBash, Payscale
