I was talking about this very topic with a friend of mine recently. He works in advertising and felt moderately disingenuous about advising young people to go

I was talking about this very topic with a friend of mine recently. He works in advertising and felt moderately disingenuous about advising young people to go into a traditional ad agency. There has never been a better, more stable time to start a business for most of the people in the western world. The internet has absolutely equalised just about every market you can think of. Fixed costs are a thing of the past; seed capital is plentiful (although there are the same number of top and second tier VCs, in Europe at least); being young is no longer a barrier to entry but a competitive advantage; there have been enough radically disruptive technologies in the last 30 years that it's pretty easy to convince seed investors to jump on board; we're living in a period where a lot of the world that was in poverty in the last four or five decades is coming out of poverty; middle classes are expanding all over the planet; with accessible languages like Rails and accessible architecture like Heroku it's a piece of piss to build and deploy a prototype… The list goes on and on for me. The major barrier to entry for creating things rather than working in corporations is the type of personality people have. I see two types of people coming out of universities in Europe: people who see problems and bitch, and people who see problems and have solutions to them. (As an aside, I follow the hashtag #firstworldproblem on Twitter because first world problems are very often the basis of a great product or service.) If you're a smart person working in a 9-5 then you're missing the biggest opportunity to do something fantastic, whether successful or not, that there has ever been. Forget the industrial revolution, or the early days of the internet. Now is the time to be building cool shit and telling people about it. Rare for me to agree with DHH but on this topic I really do.