I just started reading Donna Fenn’s new book, Upstarts (http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0071601880.html). I first heard about the book when Donna contacted me as part of her research. Donna has a great perspective on what drives today’s young entrepreneurs. Her perspective on GenY reminds me of a book I read on vacation a couple of months ago called Growing Up Digital (http://www.growingupdigital.com/Fthebook.html).
Two entrepreneurial stories in the book really hit home for me. The two stories were Nick Thomley’s Pinnacle Services and Matt Brezina’s Xobni.
Now 29, Nick created Pinnacle Services in 2000 to provide employment, housing, and in-home services to seniors and people with disabilities in Minnesota. Nick and I actually went to school together for a couple of years when we were very young. I bumped into him a number of years later through my sister-in-law Jennifer Castillo who does program planning for Hennepin County. More recently, Nick and I were honored as young entrepreneurs of the year by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal (http://twincities.bizjournals.com/twincities/stories/2009/07/27/). Although I am not at all involved in the type of work Pinnacle does, I have a great sense of admiration for the risk Nick took to build a great socially needed business, and now topping $9 million in annual revenue, no one can argue with his success.
Matt Brezina co-founded Xobni in his late twenties. Xobni is a plug-in that brings Outlook to the Web 2.0 era. I have been a big fan of Xobni since I started using their application in March of 2009, and we became business partners in April 2009. The company I co-founded, W3i (http://www.W3i.com) helps distribute Xobni to massive amounts of new Outlook users. As Donna describes in her book, when it came to Outlook, would we have expected this kind of new innovation to come from software executives in their 40’s? Hardly…
Congratulations on a very interesting, well researched book Donna! I look forward to reading through the rest and sharing it with other young entrepreneurs.
