Smart Is Beautiful

This was in response to a very well written post from 22-year-old David Meckelburg:
http://splicetoday.com/pop-culture/an-obituary-for-the-1980s

Next time, Mr. Meckelburg, you should “google” the age of the founders of Google before you insist that Gen-Xers (those born from 1965-1976) aren’t the reigning monarchs of the Internet.  You stated, “I feel so sorry for Generation X. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world.”  Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were born in 1971 and 1972, respectively.

You mentioned that the, “1980s were probably the most stable decade this country has seen,” with the implication that this stasis was not only boring, but uninspiring compared to the radical 60s. Perhaps this blessed stability is why so many of that generation were able to find such early success.  Here are a few more examples of those “do-nothing care-nothing kids” from Generation X who put their passion to work by founding:

·         Amazon – Jeff Bezos (b. 1964)

·         eBay – Pierre Omidyar (b. 1967)

·         Hotmail – Sabeer Bhatia (b. 1968)

·         Netscape – Marc Andreessen (b. 1971)

·         MySpace – Chris DeWolfe (b. 1966) & Tom Anderson (b. 1970)

·         PayPal – Peter Theil (b. 1967), Max Levchin (b. 1975) & Elon Musk (b. 1971)

·         Wikipedia – Jimmy Wales (b. 1966) & Larry Sanger (b. 1968)

·         Yahoo – David Filo (b. 1966) & Jerry Yang (b. 1968)

·         YouTube – Steve Shih Chen (b. 1978) Chad Hurley (b. 1977) & Jawed Karim (b. 1979) 

Facebook is one I’ll give you since Mark Zuckerberg was born in 1988.  However, some would argue that his brainchild is just a redesign of the already popular MySpace. And though he doesn’t receive much credit, the critical start-up revenue for Facebook came from PayPal co-founder Peter Theil (see reference above).

One more thing: you said that, “my great-grandkids are going to be asking what it was like to live through 9/11.” Obviously, nothing affected the American psyche - of both young and old - like the tragedy of September 11th since it was the first real threat to the perceived safety of the continental United States.

And you might want to remember, when your great-grandchildren ask, that you were only 15-years-old on September 11th (you mentioned that you were ten in 1996) so you were probably watching television at school when the attacks occurred.  I was out on a sales appointment since we were three days from deadline for the launch of a new business magazine. But I was lucky that the only thing that affected was our start-up revenue. 

Of the 2,996 people who perished on September 11th, over one-third between the ages of 25 and 36 and, therefore, members of Generation X.

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