"Building a startup will be the home ownership of the next century"
I don't usually watch it, but today on The Cycle I caught a segment With David Kidder, author of The Startup Playbook. In the first part of the segment, here, they showed that quote, from Chris Dixon "Tech Entrepreneur" in the first part of his book.
Home ownership was an extremely popular investment for the "middle class" for decades, so much so that it was often a major contributor to retirement for tens of millions of people. Even when pensions failed to materialize, there was the home to fall back on. Those days are likely over, and fantasizing (romanticizing?) that they will return may leave one dead and in the streets. Tens of millions of good jobs are gone, will never return in our lifetime, and the jobs that are left are under huge pressure from technology, robotics, and software. We are developing into an "hourglass economy", with some good jobs on top, a lot of people fighting for scraps around the bottom, and the middle largely gone. We could build walls and try to secure it all again, but the rest of the world is moving forward without us, so that is unlikely to be a good strategy for a nation such as ours. Beyond that, the cost to build up what we need now is likely in the scores of trillions of dollars, and no one seems interested in re-investing such sums, even if it was possible to lay our hands on it.
Maybe it's time to put aside the longing for the old cheese that no longer exists and go on the hunt for the new.
You don't have to build the startup, but you can sure work with others to create one. It doesn't even have to be a new idea, it could just be figuring out how to do something that is already being done but locally, and begin to educate your neighbors as to the reason buying from your group is better for their bottom line. Learn to own the assets, to squeeze a profit from it, maybe even create a cooperative effort that takes care of your whole group.
Not easy, and it can take a long time, but if you think the future is going to be any better than this, and that some semblance of the past is going to return before you return to dust, you might be fooling yourself.
Public resources might even be useful - in this story...
...Arizona State is planning in the next few months to roll out a network of co-working business incubators inside public libraries, starting with a pilot in the downtown Civic Center Library in Scottsdale. The university is calling the plan, ambitiously, the Alexandria Network.
I talked with a woman the other day who, with some friends, got a free room in the back of a doughnut shop to do a similar thing, and all they invested was their own wireless router. And buy some doughnuts periodically.
You may not even need to start a business, just educate each other on the manufacturing resources available in your community, and teach yourselves what you need to know to work in this century, as opposed to the last one. A local community college can help, but 3D printers can now be bought for a few hundred bucks, and one can get a kit for Arduino processor kit from Make Magazine for around a hundred bucks to teach yourself programming a machine, so you may not even need to pay a school for the privilege. Such knowledge could become very useful. For example,
How robots are eating the last of America’s—and the world’s—traditional manufacturing jobs, found here.
Or
Can America code its way to more factories? Here.
These are some very powerful trends that people may resist, or ignore at their own peril. Many will take advantage of them around us, so would be to our benefit to learn to profit from them. Or at least not be bulldozed by those that do.
Just a thought. Not that we are behind, but the word "startup" won't even get past our spell checker. That's seems like a lesson.
Good luck.
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What could possibly go wrong?
