When I finished university, I had two choices: either to go and work with a big company, and be accused by friends of contributing to a speculative or polluting industry concerned only with making money, or to go and undertake social tasks through NGOs.
Now, fortunately, you don’t have to make that choice. You only have to consider to whom or what sector you can contribute the very best, and do it well.
We have great potential for improving our surroundings, wherever we are, of providing solutions to the challenges around us. Can we create companies that work well, even in the most disadvantaged settings? Yes, we can do that, and there are thousands of examples of all around the world.
According to the data we have at the Kauffman Foundation, the world’s largest private pro-entrepreneurship institution, in the United States all the new net jobs have been created by companies that have been running for fewer than five years.
We have to focus on the new and young startups, as if they were our own sons and daughters. We have to remove barriers and smooth the way for such companies.
Working as I do in nearly 130 countries, what I see is that this phenomenon is taking place all over the world.
And this bottom-to-top creative capacity is not a phenomenon of individuals, but rather of teams of people. Most entrepreneurs have an average age of 39 years, and they have highly motivated teams. Nowadays, networks are the great turning point, at the centre of everything, and they connect with mentors, investors, client know-how, etc.
The good news is that all you young people were born into this networked society. Never have there been so many possibilities as there are now for entrepreneurship and for maintaining a constant dialogue with potential clients, receiving constant information about what they yearn for.
We no longer speak of success and failure, but rather of ongoing feedback, of in-service learning in which you are permanently adjusting the team, the product and processes, in what boils down to an organic flow.
Entrepreneurs are those who create the capital to invest, not the other way around.There are now big opportunities to experiment at very low cost.
We are in a scenario of globalization of a democratization of entrepreneurship. You can now form part of a global community. I am so jealous of your generation!
And all that does not depend or whether you live in a strong economy or a country that has problems. Institutions and government are increasingly less important. The world is now about individuals and teams!
