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Meet 30 Cool Young Entrepreneurs
- kacy 16y agoHey, I know a few of those people in real life! That's neat.
- grasshoper 16y agoMe too. Go Ooshma!
- tansey 16y agoThis is a horribly edited article. Almost every 3-sentence summary includes some typographic or grammatical error. Some interesting companies though. Glad to know I'll still be considered a "young" entrepreneur for a couple more years. :)
- MHofman12 16y agoTansey: My bad. We were crunched for time on Friday and I decided to launch the list on schedule while continuing to polish the copy. Think of it as editorial agile development... As for the comments here about how we pick the list and finding good hooks and all of that, I guess I would simply say that we look each year to create a list with a variety of entrepreneurs who are doing creative things, building interesting companies, and challenging the status quo in their industries. Celebrated start-ups such as Foursquare and Posterous were on our radar from the get-go, but we were equally interested in writing about less showy companies such as the e-mail marketer iContact and the fabric retailer CityCraft. I think the result is a fairly unpredictable list; some people are very familiar with some of the companies, but I doubt that anybody is familiar with every company (SuperJam is pretty great, don't you think?) Finally, for those of you who think young people are not particularly interesting, I'd recommend our regular "How I Did It" feature, or the section on our site devoted to serial entrepreneurs: http://www.inc.com/serial-entrepreneurs http://www.inc.com/serial-entrepreneurs Best, Mike Hofman Editor, Inc.com mhofman [at] inc.com
- maxklein 16y agoThis article made me realise - no matter how much money you are making or how cool your company is - to get featured in such big magazines, your idea has to be simple and it has to be interesting. There has to be some interesting hook, either in your idea or in you. Most reporters are not going to do days of research to find the companies - they will just go for the low hanging fruit. They will think of the companies they remember, look through some lists and that's basically it. If you have a clear hook, then they will remember you and will feature you. So for example, the Visual Website Optimizer (that A/B testing guy), he lacks a hook. Where is the user interest - he won't appear in such a list. But if he creates a hook, writes his own story, and makes sure the relevant reporters see it somewhere, such that they can remember it when they are writing an article, then it will be featured sooner or later. Your business has basically years to get featured. You can build your human-interest angle somewhere within that time.
- axod 16y agoThe question is though, is getting featured in such a list a good thing. Does it lead to good things? Perhaps I'm just a bitter "old" person (over 30), but I'm not convinced it matters that much. IMHO The Visual Website Optimizer guy should concentrate on providing value and cool stuff for customers rather than pandering to journalists fashion tastes. If he's providing real value, it's fairly simple to start paying for advertising and driving new customers to sign up etc.
- maxklein 16y agoYou're absolutely right. Such lists mean nothing to your core business, and the effect is minor in the long run. Imagine you want to create a great airline. What do newspaper articles have to do with that? If your airline is great, people will hear about you. That's how it should be. My original point was just about why it seems that it's always the same people being featured. It's because those people just have more human interest in their concepts than other people, and the fundamentals of their businesses have little to do with their being featured.
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- dmix 16y agoTwitter clone + 15,000 users = Cool Young Entrepreneur?
- abstractbill 16y agoI often get the feeling that being under 30 is more important to Inc than other more obvious measures of success.
- dmix 16y agoIt likely has more to do with PR agencies than anything.
- galois 16y agoWell is this part of that 30 under 30 thing they do? There's nothing wrong with focusing on a particular demographic.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- evansolomon 16y agoNo more than you could point to "Seniors Jeopardy," "GED Jeopardy" or "Aspiring Actor Jeopardy" in the TV Guide. Choosing to focus on a particular demographic doesn't, and shouldn't, compel you to focus on any others.
- ekanes 16y agoCheck out the pictures of the entrepreneurs they're profiling. It's a far cry from "30 white males under 30"
- evansolomon 16y agoBeing "successful" isn't necessarily the point, and I don't think it needs to be. If the goal were to write about the most successful companies, there would probably never be a startup mentioned--and it would probably be an article you had no interest in reading. "Google, still huge. Exxon, yup they make a ton of money. Etc etc."
- icco 16y agoI'm happy this list has a little variety in it. It may have a few grammatical errors, but at least this isn't another here are another ten companies run by guys from silicon valley. Sure it has some of those companies, but I'm glad to see some variety.
- brianbreslin 16y agoThis made me sad. I'm 27 and still haven't made a multi-million $ business. at least i've got 2 years to hit the list, i guess. any press like this is good press for these startups/entrepreneurs. I was recently featured in the local paper here for 20 under 40, and got a lot of good feedback, and built up my local rep that way.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mahmud 16y agoWork towards your own standards of excellence, not others'. I found excellence to be too much work, and now aim for adequacy.
- hwang89 16y agoLOL at #6 - Maverick Carter Lebron James' childhood friend, and head of his marketing firm, essentially ruined his image - “His brand is [bleep] now,” one high-level NBA official said late Thursday. “He’s destroyed everything.” Life is great when you're riding coattails.