Great flood of young people setting up own businesses

Financial

United Press International
Chicago Sun-Times

March 17, 1986

Los Angeles -- When Steven Jobs walked into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal hotel wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt recently, he was mobbed by a throng of excited young admirers.

Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer Inc. who resigned last year to form Next Inc., arrived at the hotel to address a convention of collegiate entrepreneurs.

The 30-year-old Jobs was treated more like a visiting rock star than the creative spark of a $2 billion-a-year company.

"The kids went nuts. It's like the way people used to react to Jimi Hendrix," said Bernard Tenenbaum, assistant director of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Center at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, as he watched the young entrepreneurs gawk at Jobs.

In what many see as the greatest surge in entrepreneurism since the days of Carnegie and Mellon, a growing number of people, some as young as 18, have struck out on their own, foresaking the safety and financial security of working for big business.

"I wouldn't feel comfortable working for someone else," said Brett Davis, the 27-year-old chairman of a Dallas real estate company that posted revenues of $760 million last year.

People like Jobs and Davis have become role models for budding young entrepreneurs, said Verne Harnish, executive director of the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs, the Wichita, Kan., organization that sponsored the convention.

The association's "top 100" listing of young entrepreneurs, which is headed by Jobs and Davis and has an average age of 21.5 years, amassed $4.9 billion in total revenue last year, or an average of $39.7 million.

"Money or wealth is sort of a booby prize," Jobs said. "Passion drives entrepreneurs, not the desire for wealth."

Several of the successful young businessmen and women who addressed the convention never completed college. And some, like Davis, never graduated from high school.

Another young entrepreneur, Michael Dell, dropped out of college after one year to tend to his Austin, Texas, computer mail-order business. Dell, 21, posted sales of $36 million last year.

"I had no time for school," he said. "I just saw too much opportunity out there and couldn't stay in school watching it all go by."

Tenenbaum, of the Wharton School, one of the nation's leading business schools, is concerned about the message these "role models" may be sending aspiring entrepreneurs.

"You've got to hope these kids aren't forgetting to read Plato and the rest of Western humanist thinking so we don't breed a crop of kids who are successful in business but not successful in life," he said.

For Kim Merritt, the 18-year-old president of Kim's Khocolate Inc., a Cumberland, Md. candy company, business is life.

"It's like the family dog," Merritt said. "I grew up with it. When I graduated from high school there was no choice. There was nothing else I wanted to do."

Merritt said she turned down an acceptance to Pennsylvania State University to devote herself to her business.