Part 3. Young entrepreneurs.
Keywords
new business creations, young people, technology, take risks, opportunity, possibility.
Vocabulary
stigma, start-up, influx, venture capital, notch.
A. Listen to a report about young entrepreneurs in the United States. Take notes and complete the following outline.
The United States is in the midst of a bloom in new business creations, one that is being carried out primarily by entrepreneurs in their teens, twenties and thirties.
Never before have so many young people started so many businesses.
Technology is changing everything, says Kate O'Halloran, who helps run a graduate entrepreneur program at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
And no one, she says, is more tuned in to the latest technology than young people.
Add to that the unusually long recent period of national prosperity, Mr O'Halloran says, and you have a youthful generation with a unique outlook on life.
This new generation of twenty and thirty somethings have never really seen a war, they've never really had an economic depression.
They are absolutely willing and able to take more financial risks, social risks.
The stigma of having a start-up that has failed is almost a badge of honor, which is certainly unique to this country and very, very different than in years past.
Business historian Rita David agrees there's never been a period in American history where so many young people have started business that have made them so wealthy so quickly.
But she says, there have been periods which share some of today's characteristics.
She points to the turn of the last century, the late 1800s and early 1900s as an example.
It was a time of huge technological change, and you've always had tremendous opportunity when you've had tremendous change in techonology.
You had a huge influx of immigrants into the country, really following the notion of American dream, which is that America was the land of infinite opportunity.
It was then Rita David said that Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie founded a steel plant that would eventually make him the richest man in the world.
It was in that period, she says, that banker J.P Morgan provided venture captial for such new firms as International Harvester, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, and General Electric.
Like today, she says, there was a sense of limitless possibility.
What always happened in the past is that you had these huge boom times,
you had this huge movement of entrepreneurialism, which always tricked down to the whole population, and really moved the American standard of living up a notch.
Hopefully, she says, today's entrepreneurial boom will have similar results.