Council encourages entrepreneurship for young people

Young college graduates should prepare to be the most entrepreneurial generation yet or face massive unemployment, according to Scott Gerber, founder of the Young Entrepreneur Council, a three-month-old board of more than 80 entrepreneurs that counts among its members former USG president Josh Weinstein ’09.

The council was set up to give advice to students who want to start their own businesses in an era in which Gerber said an increasing number of college graduates are turning away from traditional application-based jobs to entrepreneurship. But at Princeton, the last five years have not seen a statistical trend toward self-employment despite increased resources for entrepreneurship on campus.

Only 0.51 percent of the Class of 2010 reported self-employment in the senior survey conducted by the Office of Career Services. Though Weinstein’s Class of 2009 had 1.16 percent of graduates reporting self-employment, none of the other classes in the past five years has seen a figure above 1 percent, according to Director of Career Services Beverly Hamilton-Chandler.

Overall, the University’s employment success rate is much higher than the collegiate average. Last year, only 24.4 percent of college seniors nationwide who sought jobs were employed after graduation, according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. At Princeton, 66 percent of members of the Class of 2010 seeking employment found it in some form.

Nonetheless, Gerber — who was jobless after his 2005 graduation from New York University — maintained that entrepreneurship is still very important.

“There is a move away from resume-driven society,” Gerber said. “And there is a move toward the most entrepreneurial generation” in the world. After several failed business startups, Gerber successfully founded Sizzle It!, a company that produces “sizzle reels” — short, fast-paced videos that provide an overview of a product or service.

Gerber said he was inspired to create the Young Entrepreneur Council while writing “Never Get a Real Job,” a book published earlier this month that chronicles entrepreneurial feats and failures and the lessons they offer.

“My failed business almost bankrupted me,” Gerber said. “Learning to fail helps people overcome their failures and move past it.”

“Top-tier folks are willing to give back to this generation,” Gerber added. “We are helping young entrepreneurs building smarter, more economic, friendly businesses.”

Weinstein now serves on the Young Entrepreneur Council, which was featured in The New York Times on Sunday. Weinstein deferred a job offer at a New York City consulting firm to work on his social networking website CollegeOnly.com.

“It can help to both connect members of the council with best practices and ideas as well as sharing those ideas with others looking to get started,” Weinstein said of the council.

Closer to home, “Princeton right now is fairly anti-entrepreneurial,” Weinstein said. “But that seems to be changing for the better.”

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When Sabrina Parsons ’96, an entrepreneur and chief executive of Palo Alto Software, was a student at Princeton 15 years ago, there were no entrepreneurial courses and no Entrepreneurship Club. But Parsons has since gone on to head the Princeton Entrepreneurs’ Network and said that despite the lack of an explicit entrepreneurial focus on campus, the University still gave her the tools she needed to reach her goals in business.

“Princeton taught me [that] being prepared, organized and a participant is more than 90 percent of the battle,” Parsons said.

According to Gerber, the trend toward entrepreneurship means less emphasis on experience and resumes.

Weinstein said he thinks there are three main reasons why a “lack of experience” can be beneficial.

“We aren’t set in certain patterns or modes of thought, and we are likely more risk-seeking,” Weinstein said. “Also, we don’t know what isn’t possible or why things shouldn’t or can’t be changed.”

Although the Young Entrepreneur Council supports an anti-resume mentality, Gerber said the college an entrepreneur attends is still important. But graduates have been affected by high unemployment rates regardless of their college’s name, he said.

Hamilton-Chandler said she agrees that college choice still matters for young entrepreneurs but does not think there is a move away from a resume-driven society.

“A resume is a marketing document, and you will need one whether you seek to work for someone else or seek to market your own business,” Hamilton-Chandler said. “For young entrepreneurs with limited experience, a selling point may be the university they attended.”

Looking back, Parsons said that she wished she had understood the value of finding the right people to help run her business and take it to the next level. Although Career Services is not in direct contact with the Young Entrepreneur Council, Hamilton-Chandler said that the office connects students with similar networking resources and offers highly individualized career counseling.

Still, some students complained about the fractured nature of the University’s entrepreneurial offerings. Though classes like ELE 491: High-Tech Entrepreneurship have become more and more popular over the past few years, they generally exist as their own entities, rather than as part of a “cohesive program to provide interested students with an entrepreneurial background,” Meg Partridge ’14 said in an e-mail. Partridge helped organize this month’s TEDx conference, which aimed to expose students to a wide variety of successful entrepreneurial ventures.

“In the context of an increasingly interconnected world, the importance of exploring innovation in design and in entrepreneurial ventures is becoming increasingly apparent,” she said.