Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Gainesville’s own Grooveshark co-founder Josh Greenberg addressed an auditorium full of UF millennials last week. The talk touched on the Internet, entrepreneurship and failure.
Their message can be summed up as such: Take a risk, do not be afraid to fail, and if you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life. The presentation, full of memes and the occasional cat picture — we are talking about the Internet, after all — was meant to encourage a group of young people to realize all of the wealth of information and opportunity that is in front of them.
Ohanian and Greenberg told their stories of triumph, failure and risk-taking. Ohanian recalled how the founders of Reddit were sent to Yahoo headquarters, only to be rudely criticized by an executive. Greenberg recalled some of the obstacles Grooveshark faced in its onset. Regardless of these hurdles in the way of their Internet success stories, they persevered, powered through and prevailed.
The event was inspiring. It made me feel like I should start my own Internet company.
But the thing I took away from the event — more powerful than any startup story — was the unbridled power of a young person’s spirit.
Take these individuals: At face value, they are just two young people. Only one of them has a college degree, and both described themselves as having a geeky adolescence. With this in mind, it is hard to imagine they’d later attain such success.
But the intangibles made the difference — the drive, the determination and the realization that they could start something big. What do you attribute that to? I’d say it’s the power of a young person’s spirit. We all have it, but many of us don’t realize how powerful it is. When we fail — and we will — we are young enough to believe that there will always be another opportunity for us to take advantage of.
The power of a young person comes from the way he or she sees the world. The world seems to be so open for the taking. As college students, we have not yet gotten a real taste of the world. As we sit in our dorm rooms and classrooms thinking about our future endeavors in the real world, we can do so only by picturing the real world in the way it should work, not the way it does work. Even though this sounds like a negative outlook, it’s not. We need starry eyed idealism in this world. We need visionaries who see the world differently. Though some might think they are crazy, we need those young people crazy enough to think differently.
This harkens back to the famous 1997 Apple commercial where “the people who think they are crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.”
You may be thinking, that’s good and that’s great. But how does this affect me? I can’t start a business. I’m just a college student with a literature degree.
It would be too easy to rattle off the names of successful college-aged entrepreneurs, Ohanian and Greenberg included, to combat this mindset. But I would suggest taking a look in your backyard. Surprisingly, Gainesville is becoming an entrepreneurial hub. There are so many incubators and advisers willing to help your startup idea. Start by taking the Introduction to Entrepreneurship class. Go to the Innovation Hub and Starter Space. And really, that’s just the beginning.
When you see this thriving entrepreneurial community in Gainesville and all of the information and resources at your disposal, you begin to think, “Should I start something?” instead of “Could I start something?”
And why not now? You’re a young person after all.
Michael Beato is a UF economics sophomore. His column appears on Wednesdays. A version of this column ran on page 7 on 1/22/2014 under the headline "Entrepreneurs in Gainesville prove that idealism earns jobs"
