Underreported hazards in early-stage startups

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It’s Tuesday, which is usually the day for the Twentysomething column. But Ryan announced last week that he’s quitting as a columnist. I’m not surprised. He’s gone through a huge transition – quit his job in Washington, DC, started a company (with me), and moved to Madison, WI – two blocks from me.

It’s a small town, so it’s not like he was ever going to move ten miles from me – I mean, ten miles from me in almost any direction is a corn field. But it’s funny to me to have him so close.

I ended up going over to his house a lot in the first few days, to check in on him and Ryan P without saying so. Almost immediately my kids saw the situation as new neighbors. They refer to “The Ryans” and when we went apple picking, the kids thought of the Ryans immediately.

So we brought over a bag of apples. The kids did not really understand the concept of red all over, so the apples were not ripe. And I couldn’t tell if the Ryans noticed, but they were very grateful, because it was when the Ryans first got here. When they were grateful in general.

Now it’s been six weeks. And Ryan is thinking that maybe his new blog will be about how crazy life is working with me.

I asked for examples. He gave the one about how I invited the Ryans over for dinner. I picked a night when my husband wasn’t home because there is too much tension between us to put the Ryans through it as well. I also picked the night my kids wanted an impromptu Halloween party.

So there was our nanny, who is actually a guy who is a college sophomore taking a year off to establish residency so his University of Wisconsin tuition goes down. And there were fake eyeballs and pumpkin glitter. And it was like a frat party with toddlers instead of girls. To me, that is the weird part. To Ryan, it’s weird that I didn’t cook.

“You ordered burritos!” he says.

I tell him it was better than Batman spaghetti O’s.

He shakes his head in disbelief. He thinks I’m eccentric, which I probably am, but I think this is not the best example.

Other mentioned eccentricities: I have been working out of a coffee shop for a year. Ryan can’t believe it.

The women who own the shop are probably my best friends in Madison – I see them every day. In the summer they noticed me showing up in my obsessive long sleeves and long pants so the sun doesn’t get me, and in the winter they saw me fighting with my husband at the curb when he drops me off. I always imagined I’d have some great post about how the owners let me do radio interviews from their land line (radio producers hate cell phones) and they buy Lean Cuisines especially for me so I don’t have to eat their muffins for lunch. It was a great setup.

Til the Ryans came.

They said everyone in the coffee shop is annoyed by my talking on the phone, which is probably true. So we went to their apartment. Like it’s not eccentric for me to be spending my days in the apartment of two twentysomething guys.

But as we were leaving the coffee shop for good, new art was going up on the wall: Phil Porter. I loved the art. Ryan hated it. So I gave a lecture right before we left, about why good art forces you to see things differently and the Ryans only like art with naked women on it because it doesn’t challenge anything that’s already in their mind. (Yes, they have a painting of a naked woman in the apartment. And yes, it sucks.) Ryan called me a snob.

He is a snob, too. For example, Ryan does not wear black shoes with khaki pants. I have never heard of this rule, but I confess to immediately putting my khakis aside until I got brown shoes, just in case he’s right.

Maybe we get along because we’re both snobs. Or maybe our excessive judgementalism, which probably makes for good blog posts, gives us a sort of detente.

I went out to dinner with Ryan P’s parents. I can’t ever recall going out to dinner with a co-worker’s parent. But here’s a tip. You know how when you go out to dinner with a boyfriend and his parents, you end up liking him even more? I am not sure why, but this always happens. And I have to say that the same thing happened in this situation: I liked him better. He has the same odd speech cadence as his dad, the same bright smile as his mom. It was nice to see.

Nice as long as I could squash my jealously; I don’t recall a time when my parents drove across state lines to dote on me.

Now I wake the Ryans in the morning. They are not morning people. I know you expected this post to be about starting a company, and this sort of is, because the first part of starting a company is learning boundaries.

A startup is inherently intense. Founders are so dependent on each other, and there are almost always only two or three people involved. I have two close friends who have startups: The woman’s company is three women and the man’s company is three men. I think that most startups with a both genders involve sex, and/or marriage, and those that don’t require navigation of a difficult and dicey new language of boundaries, (which I have touched on before).

There is a lot written about work spouses. That is, people who feel like they spend so much time together that they’re married. But they are not. The context for these relationships is usually a big company, where there is safety in numbers, and there are office conventions to keep boundaries in place.

A startup usually has none of these safeguards, and a startup usually entails longer hours at the office. Maybe this is why so many startup teams are all men or all women, but not mixed. And maybe this is why my friend, who has a startup team of three guys and will not consider hiring a woman as the fourth, is making a smart decision.

Meanwhile, we continue to draw boundaries at our own startup. For example:

Ryan P comes to the dining room table that is also our office and says, I have a rash.

I start thinking about my kids.

Where is it?

On my leg.

Can I see?

No.

Why not?

It’s too early. Ask in twenty minutes.

Tyeptyeptyep type

Can I see it ?

No.

While Ryan P is typing a blog post about how he would rather work for man than a woman (yes really: he says men bond better with men) I look under the table. I don’t see the rash, but the light is not that good.

What are you doing?

I need to see it.

It’s not on my leg. It’s on my groin.

And this is the moment. The boundary moment. I look away because some boundaries are clear. But I also think of my kids – some boundaries are murky — and I navigate the best way I know how as CEO of a startup:

Does it itch?

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Twentysomething: Preparing for life without health insurance

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By Ryan Healy – About a month ago, my brother, Dan, was in the hospital. Originally, the doctors told him he had a small cut, and he should use some Neosporin to prevent infection. A couple of days later, they told him he had a staph infection. Staph infections are bad, but for my brother they are especially bad.

Dan was born with congenital heart disease, and any type of infection could be life-threatening. My parents hopped in the car and made the 10-hour drive from Connecticut to Columbus, OH. According to my parents, the three days in the Columbus hospital were like a bad episode of House. Nobody knew exactly what was wrong. The infectious disease doctors were in and out of his room every day.

Eventually, Dan was released from the hospital. The antibiotics killed the infection before it could spread. Regardless, the whole experience was incredibly scary for all of us. And it really made me nervous to ditch my corporate job with benefits to work at a startup with no health insurance.

But my mind was made up and sticking with my job was not an option. So the first thing I did was schedule a physical. I crossed my fingers and went into the doctors office, hoping there was nothing wrong. At first glance I was fine.

The doctor than asked if I wanted to have some blood tests done to test for HIV, hepatitis and whatever else they test. It sounded like a good idea at the time, so I strapped in and gave some blood. I regretted the decision immediately. If I tested positive for anything, private health insurance would go from expensive to completely unaffordable.

Luckily, everything turned out fine. But you know there is something wrong with the health care system when putting off being tested for a life-threatening disease for a few months is a “smart” financial option.

After the blood tests, the doctor asked if I wanted to have my cholesterol checked. Despite my mother constantly reminding me of my family’s high cholesterol, I declined for fear of an unusually high test and in turn, higher future health care costs. Finally, before leaving, I requested a tetanus shot even though I was 99 percent positive that it wasn’t necessary.

Buying fitted running shoes was next on my list. I try to run four to five times per week and my legs were beginning to bother me. It was definitely time for a new pair of shoes. But a week before you quit your job to pursue something with no immediate stream of income is not a great time to drop $100 on shoes.

After some thought, I realized that $100 now could be the only thing saving me from a stress fracture or another common running injury, which could end up saving me thousands in future uninsured medical costs.

After doing everything I could think of to prepare for life without insurance, a buddy of mine told me about a program that covers 80 percent of all medical expenses after a $500 deductible for “healthy” 23-year-old guys. It’s certainly not free, but all things considered, it’s a really good deal. (I plan to actually purchase the plan this week, so if anyone knows of a better deal, please let me know!)

Still, I’m lucky that I don’t have any preexisting medical conditions. I’m lucky I am not on any prescription drugs and I’m lucky to have tested negative for any diseases. Not everyone will be able to get such a good deal, and that’s a big problem.

My brother has full intentions of continuing his own business and starting companies for years to come, but he is going to have to take some major risks once he is off of my parents’ insurance policy.

Whether this means purchasing a catastrophic plan, borrowing money or completely going off of insurance, he will figure it out and I will help however I can. Because dropping everything to chase a dream might sound risky, but in my book, working a dead-end job for fear of not having health coverage is much riskier.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Big announcement: I’m starting a company!

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Before I tell you about my company, I want to tell you that ever since I started spending eight hours a day on my blog – which was about two months after I started blogging – I have always thought of the blog as a business.

People would marvel that I could spend so much time on something that is making no money, but I always knew that I was building something bigger. I just didn’t know what it was. So while I’ve been blogging this whole time, I’ve been studying business models, and watching other people turn blogs into businesses and media conglomerates, and I’ve been thinking about what I can do with my blog.

In October I will officially launch the site Brazen Careerist, at the URL brazencareerist.com. BUT WAIT! Don’t click there! Because I’m in arbitration with the guy who is squatting on it, and it’s already killing me how much money he’s making from running ads on the domain. Fortunately my lawyer swears to me that the URL is rightfully mine.

Brazen Careerist will be a network of bloggers talking about the intersection of work and life, and it will be a resource for young people who understand that they are in the driver’s seat when it comes to employment. What does being in the driver’s seat mean? It means first that you are responsible for your own career – your personal growth, your personal brand, and your personal fulfillment. But it also means that you understand that you are in the driver’s seat when it comes to employers; companies need to cater to employees if they want to get the good ones.

To get things rolling, the first thing I did was join forces with Employee Evolution. It’s a great community blog for young people talking about work, and their traffic is growing quickly. To create this partnership I had to negotiate with Ryan Healy, who has a guest column on this blog titled Twentysomething.

Background: I met Ryan online when he asked me to check out his blog, Employee Evolution. He had only posted twice, but I loved both posts, and I hated thinking that such great posts about my topic area were not on my blog, so I invited him to guest blog.

He has been doing that for about six months, instigating ire among many commenters. But I love his posts. Well, I love most of them. Some of them I have thought were sort of stupid, but I didn’t say anything, and often those turned out to be really popular. I liked that I could trust him to know what would be a good post.

One of his posts made me want to kill him. It was when he wrote that his Baby Boomer dad was talking with him about how companies need to teach Baby Boomers how to “pass the torch to Generation Y”. LIKE THERE ARE NO GEN-XERS IN CORPORATE AMERICA???!??!

But it is actually true that the Baby Boomers and Millennials think Gen-X does not exist. So I liked that Ryan is able to capture that situation; now I have somewhere to link to when I want to bitch about it.

I quickly realized that his posts were very popular and his blog was growing very quickly. I thought of paying him per post, but I didn’t think that would actually matter to him. I mean, Ryan had a good job at a brand-name company and his boss loved him. I remembered when I had a big job and I wrote weekly columns for Business 2.0 magazine; the money was so un-motivating to me that I often forgot to send an invoice. I thought about what did motivate me — personal growth, the excitement of learning about what I can do, and learning how publishing works.

I knew I had to do this for Ryan. And this is the ultimate question for corporate America. Right? How to retain Generation Y when their primary motivator is not money.

I focused on being a really good mentor to him and helping him open doors. But I couldn’t figure out what doors to help him open until I knew what he wanted. So I tried stuff. Like I told him I could help him get a book deal, and he said, “I don’t really see what doing a book will get me.” He had a point. I’m the first person to say don’t do a book unless you have a plan for leveraging it to do something else in your career.

After a while, I realized that he wanted to start a company. This was great news to me because I wanted to start a company too, but I needed to find the right people to do it with.

A lot of people come to me with company ideas – some want me to join them, some want to buy Brazen Careerist – lots of ideas, none of them right for me. After all, I’ve got two young kids. So I can’t relocate to New York City (yes, someone offered, just ten months after I left New York City) and I can’t keep crazy startup hours because I want to be with my kids.

Ryan and his partner, Ryan Paugh, seemed great for me. There is a reason that Silicon Valley is full of startups run by twentysomething guys. Sure, there is the technology issue – that more guys take computer science courses so more guys start technology companies. But it’s more than that. Guys in their twenties don’t have kids — they don’t even hear the tick of a biological clock – and they have the ability to focus almost solely on work. In fact, Ryan told me that he had a fling with a 26-year-old, but it made him uncomfortable because “every woman over 25 is just looking to get married.”

So Ryan and Ryan are moving to Madison to do the company, which should be very fun. But if you think generation Y’s sense of entitlement is bad at your office when you are trying to get work out of them, you should see what their sense of entitlement looks like when you’re negotiating equity.

Ryan Healy and I negotiated for two months. During that time he was in Business Week one week, the New York Times the next week. Once he put me on hold to take a call form 60 Minutes. It was crazy. He is twenty-three and had only been blogging six months, working less than a year, and he was quoted everywhere as an expert.

The final crushing blow was when the Wall Street Journal interviewed both of us about tips for young grads, and then quoted us both saying basically the same thing: Get a mentor. Hilarious, right? Since I started out as his mentor? But, like any good mentee, he started catching up to me very quickly.

So by the time I was negotiating equity with Ryan, he was asking for 50% of the company.

Every night we went back and forth about equity, and what things will look like, and what he will do, and we sort of had a sort of agreement.

And then he went back on stuff I thought we agreed on, and also stuff I thought was moronic to even question me on. So I said, “You know what? Go get some advice from an adult. Go ask someone with some experience, because this is totally ridiculous and I’m right. ”

I was so pissed off that I had to pull the car over to the side of the road in order to properly leverage my angry voice.

He said, “I can go ask someone now, but eventually you have to let me make my own decisions. We can’t work with each other if you don’t trust me to make my own decisions.”

It was a turning point. Because he was, in that moment, so much wiser than I was. I knew I was right about the business issue, but he was right about the interpersonal issue.

I have told very few people about the company because I wanted to know it was really going ahead before there was online chatter. The few friends I did tell are people who don’t read blogs. They would ask four or five times, “How old is he?!?” They were incredulous.

I tried to explain that my audience is young people so I need to go into business with young people.

I do not choose my friends for their knowledge of generational issues at work. So my discussion of the importance of working with people in other generations fell on deaf ears. Eventually each friend, trying to make sense of things, asked if Ryan and I are hooking up.

When I was in my twenties, I started a company with a guy who was much older than I was. Men asked him all the time if we were a couple. And, at the time, I thought it was an incredibly ridiculous assumption. But now that I’m the one who is older, and people are still asking the question, I am comforted by what appears to be nice gender equality when it comes to trashy assumptions about startups.

So now there’s a new company, and I’ll be blogging about it here. I’m not sure what it’ll be like, but I have an idea of what’s to come:

When I signed up for Facebook, and Recruiting Animal created my Facebook page, Ryan was the one who noticed that I had no idea how to actually use Facebook, so he gave me a tutorial.

He used his page as an example, and then, after I made sure that you can’t tell how many times someone looks at your Facebook page, I spent three nights checking out all 300 photos he had of himself and his friends. Finally, after I couldn’t take it anymore, I sent him an email about how he needs to take down some photos. I know: This after I published a post about how the photos don’t matter.

He said the photos are fine.

I said, “What about the one of you straddling that girl’s face?”

Ryan: That’s not me. It’s my friend.

Penelope: Well other people might think it’s you.

Ryan: They won’t. And no one cares.

Penelope: I cared.

Ryan: It’s because you’re so old. It’s not that big a deal. They have clothes on.

I told him he should take down the photo.

I don’t know if he did. And that’s the beauty of our relationship: I tell him my Gen -X perspective, he tells me his Gen-Y perspective, and then we each see what we can get away with.

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How to start a business from your corporate cube

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Starting a company is cheap enough that you don’t need to raise a lot of money to do it, but you still need to feed yourself. A popular route is the in-between step of being an entrepreneur while still working in a corporate job.

This means there are a lot of people running companies from their cubes. Sort of. It’s contrary to just about every company policy for you to set up your widget shop inside your cube and solicit your co-workers’ business. But most startups can skate past the corporate policy restrictions because the founder works after hours. So the entrepreneur is sitting in the cube even if the company is not, and it makes for a difficult balancing act.

Here are ten ways to manage entrepreneurship from your corporate cubicle:

1. Don’t tell your co-workers.
You will want to tell them. They will say, “How was your weekend?” and you’ll want to say, “I got two new clients and I am feeling like a startup stud!” Don’t say that. Even if you’re not doing your company at your work, it still feels like cheating to a co-worker. They don’t want to hear you’d rather be working on something else besides their stuff. You need to keep a positive profile at work even while you do your startup: The best entrepreneurs have solid networks.

2. Don’t blame your problems on lack of time.
It’s certainly a luxury to have tons of time on your hands to focus on your company all day. But most people don’t have that. Most people who start companies have kids or a day job or a girlfriend or college courses – something that distracts them. Don’t tell yourself you would do better if you had more time. Just do better now. Be smarter. Everyone is short on time all the time. It’s not an excuse.

3. Don’t have guilt.
Yes it is morally questionable to be a salaried employee and turn your cube into a call center for your other business. But you can do a ton of personal business from your cube – like call your landlord or the plumber or make plane reservation – in order to make more time to do your business from home. Most cubicle workers spend two hours a day surfing for personal reasons. And these people do not have side businesses at home. So it’s fair for you to do it, too.

4. Get on a stupid project at work.
When you have your own business you think about it all the time. You are responsible for everything, so there is no coasting while someone else deals with a problem or a project. Fortunately, that sort of coasting is rampant in big companies. So if you are starting a business at home, get on a project at work that lets you coast – that will give extra mental energy to let thoughts of your own company jump around in your head.

5. Look for like-minded people at work.
In most companies there are some people thinking like you – trying to get something off the ground while they spend their days in their cube. It’s so hard to keep believing in yourself when the startup is more idea than business. It’s hard not to toss in the towel, but you are less likely to give up if you have other entrepreneurs in your life. To sniff out the other entrepreneurs look for people who dash outside the building every day to take calls. (Reality check: If the calls are ten minutes, it’s a startup. If the calls are a half-hour, it’s a new girlfriend.)

6. Go to the gym on your lunch break.
You think you are doing something so big and so challenging and you are even holding down a full-time job while you do it, so of course you have no time to go to the gym. But exercise provides mental traits of an entrepreneur: You think more clearly, you are more self-confident, resilient to setback, and you become a person who inspires confidence in other people.

7. Sit on a yoga ball instead of a chair.
Everything you need to do to have a startup and a corporate job at the same time requires self-discipline. And this might be why entrepreneurs are happier than most people — because they have good self-discipline and people with self-discipline are more likely to get what they want in their life.

You can get self-discipline by working on your posture. No kidding. So get a ball chair for your cube. Psychologist have found that if you make one, small change in your life that requires self-discipline, like improving your posture, then you are more able to make other changes in your life that require self-discipline.

8. Partner with a stay-at-home-parent.
In general, when I have started companies, I tried not to hire people with kids because they are less able to jump for investors, more torn between where their head and heart are at any given time, and anyway, today’s parents generally do not work insanely long hours. (Yes, this is an illegal hiring practice. But it’s common.)

So anyway, if you are starting a company from your cube you are missing exactly what a stay-at-home parent has: Flexibility during the work day. One of the things that make for a successful entrepreneur is partnering with someone who can fill in the spots where you are weak, according to Andrew Zacharakis, professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College.

9. Stop fantasizing that a credit card could fund your cubicle escape.
Especially in the current credit crunch, it’s important to be conservative in how much you bet on this side-business of yours. The most successful entrepreneurs are not actually huge risk takers but people who intuitively mitigate risk wherever they can, according to Saras Sarasvathy, professor of business at the University of Virginia. The point of entrepreneurship, after all, is to get out of the cubicle, not tie yourself to it forever paying off your debt.

10. Believe in yourself.
Entrepreneurship is lonely and frustrating. This is not something people talk about a lot because the thing that makes entrepreneurs successful is a crazy optimism that they can create something big from nothing. But underneath that optimism, is a fear that things will never work.

The feelings of loneliness and fear will be exacerbated in your cubicle, where you will be surrounded by people who are satisfied with stable jobs, regular paychecks, and having someone else take responsibility for the ultimate bottom line.

In your cube is the time you will have to be your best self: Confident, productive, disciplined and optimistic. No small feat, for sure, but that’s why entrepreneurship brings out the best in us. That’s why it’s so enticing.

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Try this: Don’t ask for what you want when you negotiate

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When I founded my first company I didn’t have time to find someone to date, but I knew that I wanted to get married. So I followed all the advice I had read about how you should tell people what you want in order to get what you want. I started telling everyone that I wanted to get married, and a lot of people set me up on dates.

But things did not go well. Almost every guy I went out with ended up wanting to do business with me. (Yes, I went into business with one of them.) And often when I met with an investor about the next round of funding for my company, our meeting (that was invariably at some swanky restaurant he owned) turned into a date by the end of the evening.

I started questioning the idea that I should be so frank about looking to get married. Life is one big negotiating opportunity, and I saw I was not doing well. Also, I noticed that men don’t generally ask for what they want. The classic example: They ask you out to lunch when what they really want is sex.

There is so much written about how women are not as good at negotiating as men are. Lots of studies show that women don’t even start negotiating — nine times out of ten, men will ask and women won’t. And when women do negotiate, they don’t get what they want as often as men do.

There is no solid research to tell us the why behind the poor negotiations. Most people who toss around ideas about why women don’t ask, toss around some version of the idea that women don’t like conflict: Women like to collaborate; women are caretakers.

I don’t believe this, because in a relationship, women are typically more comfortable with conflict than men are. In fact, women are more likely than men to bring up conflict in a relationship. And men are more likely to withdraw from conflict. (This last link is so fun. It’s dating tips for guys from AskMen.com – a site that is always right on target about how women think.)

Anyway, I think the reason women do poorly in negotiations is that women assume you should ask for what you want, but men know that’s not how the game is played. Men know that you need to be aware of what you want, but that’s not necessarily what you ask for.

So then it makes sense that men negotiate more than women because women are facing conflict head-on and men are not. It’s much easier to approach someone you are not going to instigate conflict with. So negotiations work best when you don’t assume you need to ask for exactly what you want.

Think of the sex example: If a guy approaches you for sex, you hang up on him. If he approaches you for lunch, you think he’s very sweet. And then later you have sex.

Salary is another situation where you are better off not asking for what you want. In salary negotiations, you always want to wait until the other person gives the number. Even though you know what you want, if you say the first number, your counterpart will tell you it is higher than he or she was planning to pay, no matter what the number is.

When someone asks how much money you want, a way to get out asking directly for the very high salary you really want is to say things like, “I want to consider the whole package not just salary” or “I want to make sure we are a good match before we talk about salary.” This forces the other person to give a number first, and then you can say you want more.

My friend Chris Yeh gave me another good example of when you should not ask for what you want: Founding a company. He said if you want advice, ask for money, and if you want money, ask for advice. For those of you who have dealt with investors, you’ll recognize that this is exactly how the world of startups works.

And based on my own experience of trying to date while running a startup, I think this might be true too: If you want to go into business with someone, ask them on a date. And if you want to date someone, go into business with them.

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What to do in college to prepare for entrepreneurship

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One of the most popular goals among young people is to have their own company. This doesn’t mean people want to necessarily build the next Google or Facebook.

For many students this means smaller companies where you can have fun with friends while you think of cool ideas and then enjoy the steep learning curve of implementing those ideas. The most important aspects of a job for young people are flexibility and personal growth. And no job gets you that as effectively as starting your own company.

Part of starting a company is learning how to think and problem solve, and a classic college education teaches you that. But typically, colleges have prepared students to climb a corporate ladder upon graduation. And today we don’t even pretend that 40-year ladder climbs are an option.

Corporate jobs are more short-term, and sporadic— maybe something to do in between starting one’s own companies. But what can one do in college to pave the way for a career that includes entrepreneurship?

First, try to hang out with other students who have businesses, or ideas for businesses. At any given college, there is a group of students either thinking hard about entrepreneurship, or doing it. Hang around these people because they’ll teach you how to bounce ideas.

Entrepreneurs don’t have just one good idea. They have a million, and they test the ideas out on friends all the time, learning how to hone an idea and think critically until they find one that works.

The best way to come up with an idea is to try to solve problems, says Greg Boesel.

“I constantly find myself saying; there’s gotta be a better way to do this.” Then, he advises, if you think you have a better way, do 20 hours of market research to see if someone else has already tried that way.

Boesel’s current company, Swaptree, is an example of this process in action. He got the idea from a friend who returned from a visit with his mom with 16 used books he didn’t want. They were good books, but he didn’t know what to do with them. Swaptree is a company that tells you what people are willing to trade you to get the book, CD, or DVD that you don’t want.

If you don’t have an idea and you need to do something, go to a start-up to get yourself thinking in new directions.

James Ngai is a student at MIT, and he worked at a Boston music start-up while he had a full course load. Ngai is well aware that there are no long-term secure jobs in the workforce, so flexibility and broad skills are the key to success.

“Students want an open path career,” he says, “and getting start-up experience is a great way to ensure this.”

A year after getting his feet wet in someone else’s start-up, Ngai launched his own company, Campus Research and Recruiting, which helps companies understand why their recruiting practices fail or succeed and how they can be more effective.

How do you find one of those work experiences that give you a jump start in starting a company of your own? Use the career center. “This is a totally underused resource,” according to Lindsey Pollak, author of Getting from College to Career. “There’s a perception that career services only helps you for the companies that recruit, but career services have connections to tons of industries.”

And it’s not just about the networking. “It’s free career coaching,” says Pollak. And one of the keys to entrepreneurship is knowing your own strengths and how to leverage them.

Also, if you have your heart set on a start-up of your own, the best route might be the anti-start-up summer job. That is, something in staid, ladder-climbing industries like investment banking or consulting whose business models include spending tons of money on training employees. You don’t need to enter these industries after doing the summer program, and the education will serve you well when you finally think of a company you want to start.

The most important advice is probably to stay confident that things will work out for you. Just because you can’t start a company immediately doesn’t mean you won’t get a really fun job immediately. Remember that this is a very good job market for young people. In the book Recruit or Die, Chris Resto, internship director at MIT, spends nearly 300 pages describing to companies how they can attract top talent.

The recurring theme of the book is that young people have lots of choices and multiple offers, and only the companies that are smartest about what young people want will get them. What does this tell you, the candidate? That you should aim for a job that meets your needs.

What else does it tell you? That the most important thing to do in college is begin to understand what your needs are. Otherwise, you have no idea what you’re hunting for.

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Twentysomething: Forget the big city, try middle America

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By Ryan Healy — Soaring education, housing and health care costs in recent years have made simply staying afloat in a large metropolis next to impossible without a huge salary and benefits package.

These rising costs are causing the well educated to “sell their souls” to law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms to maintain the upper middle class life most of our parents provided for us, According to social critic Daniel Brook, whose debut book is The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner Take-All America.

I know what you’re thinking: Those college grads making $80,000 bonuses on Wall Street do not deserve any sympathy; They made a choice to live in the most expensive city in the country and they made a choice to work like slaves for a few years until they can retire to their yachts and country clubs.

But if you really look into the situation, Brook has a point. Wall Street I-bankers are certainly earning more than enough to simply “stay afloat,” but the rest of us are selling out for the sole reason of living in a “cool” city.

Junior year of college, I realized my passion was to become an entrepreneur. It didn’t matter. I sold out. I moved to the big city with the enormous rent payments. I took the decent paying job to support my living and partying expenses. Most people I know did the same. Some are content, some are looking for a way out, some are happy.

Some of us grew up with dreams of becoming artists, musicians or non profit executives. Regardless of the dream, most of us settled for the same thing; a decent paying job in an overpriced city. What I now realize from first hand experience is unless you’re an investment banker with semi-realistic plans of retiring at 35 with a couple million; the big city is overrated.

Is it really imperative to live on New York’s Upper East Side, San Francisco’s Marina or Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle? Why not say “screw you” to the boring job in New York and take the exciting job in Cincinnati, Ohio?

My friends from college, Matt, Cole and Adam, knew from day one they didn’t want to work for a corporation. They came up with an idea, raised some money and toured the country to find the best place for their first in a chain of restaurants called Fat Sandwich Co.

They opened in Norman, Oklahoma. All three are from the Philadelphia/New Jersey
area and all of our friends told them they would hate living in Oklahoma. Last
week Cole told me that none of them even want to move back to the east coast.

From the outside, cities like Cincinnati, Ohio and Norman, Oklahoma aren’t nearly as exciting or trendy as New York or San Francisco. According to Brook, and I completely agree, chances are we will just be able to “stay afloat” either way. Since that is the case, I will not hesitate to choosethe fulfilling, under paying job in a small city rather than grind it out during the week to party until 4a.m. on Friday with the rest of the yuppies in the big city.

My lease is up in two months and it’s finally time to pursue my passion. I want a relatively inexpensive city with good entrepreneurial opportunities. I no longer care about trendy bars; I have no desire to eat at expensive restaurants. Some things are more important. It’s time for me to make a decision, because there is no reason to be bound by geography or the “coolness” factor of a city.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Twentysomething: Start a company in 3 days with 70 friends

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By Ryan Healy – According to adults the world works in a centralized, hierarchical structure and that’s the way it will always be. They say young people will eventually adapt and accept things for how they are, despite the fact that decentralized websites and organizations have defined our childhood and early adult years.

I don’t buy it. We grew up with open source websites like Napster and Kazaa. Now we use Wikipedia and Craigslist daily. All of these sites have one thing in common; users control them. I don’t need permission to post an apartment for rent on Craigslist and I can make up any word I want and create a definition in Wikipedia.

Now there is undeniable proof that Gen-Y is bringing decentralized organizations mainstream…

After turning down $1 billion, 23 year-old Mark Zuckerberg took the user controlled Facebook to a whole new level by allowing everyone to create applications without pre-approval. If you really think about it, Facebook allows anyone to work for them without the hassle of reporting up the ladder, attending pointless meetings or even leaving their living rooms. With a good idea, a little programming knowledge and a small amount of money, anyone can make money through Facebook while simultaneously increasing the company’s bottom line.

Facebook’s revolutionary new concept is just a glimpse into the all inclusive, non-hierarchical, “out of the box” future that generation-Y will continue to invent and embrace. My friend and web designer, Devin Reams reaffirmed this thought when he told me about his experience at Startup Weekend.

The event began on a Friday, when 70 people showed up above a bike shop in Boulder, CO to vote on their favorite previously submitted business ideas. They decided to create a business that allowed people to take quick polls of their friends’ opinions.

“We broke into groups based on ‘expertise’: business development, PR/marketing, user experience, design, front end development, back end development, and legal. The groups allowed for quick action,” says Devin. “We had seven-minute update meetings every hour and the each hour flew by. On Sunday night we had a business model, website, and marketing campaigns ready to go for a product launch.”

The company was successfully started but no product had launched to the public. “This was frustrating,” says Devin, “since the world was every move on live video from Ustream. But, the project has continued beyond the weekend and a launch is expected next week. We’ve been playing with it internally and it’s amazing what a decentralized group can accomplish.”

After this amazing weekend, the group ended up with a “fast polling” website called Vosnap. The site allows you to send out a quick poll to friends via email or text messaging. For example, if a bunch of friends want to meet up for lunch, but all work in different places, they can send out a poll and meet at the restaurant that receives the most votes. Sounds pretty cool to me!

Sure, Andrew Hyde is technically the “CEO,” but he doesn’t have to approve everything, and the majority can vote him out at any time. This is strangely similar to Wikipedia’s structure of open source use based on a community of trust, rather than checks and balances. Can you imagine a typical company trying to agree on a product, design a website, create marketing campaigns, and draft contracts and legal arrangements in three days? It would take me three weeks to jump through the bureaucratic hoops just to pitch an idea to the person in charge. On a weekend; forget about it.

When you put a group of talented, motivated young people together for three days without bosses, titles or egos, things seem to magically run very smoothly. Watching Facebook evolve and hearing stories like Devin’s excite me. They are proof that young people are not only motivated and capable of working together, but they show that we don’t have to adapt to the status quo of the corporate world to succeed. Hopefully big business starts taking a few lessons from these progressive young leaders.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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What to write to make your business card sing

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A few weeks ago I wrote about the braided career. The idea is that in order to create stability in a world where career change is frequent and job security is non-existent, you need to be managing three things at all times: your personal life, what you are doing for work now, and what you might want to do next. These things are intertwined, and make for an interesting, stable, but complicated life. If you consciously braid then you keep things in order.

But how do you translate that to a business card? What do you call yourself?

The answer is that your business card should directly reflect the story you are telling about yourself in the moment. And in fact, the issue of what to put on your business card is actually a very fundamental question.

The best way to get a clear sense of who you are is not to philosophize with your head in the clouds, but rather, to describe yourself in sentences. Sometimes this means writing a lot, sometimes this means talking a lot. This is why keeping a diary keeps some people feeling centered and talk therapy keeps other people centered. It’s also why when you are working on your elevator pitch about yourself, you get better and better with practice, because you understand yourself better each time you talk about yourself.

When you meet someone new, and they ask you “what do you do?” Blogger Pam Slim gives a great answer: She says to answer what you want to be doing. That is, you are under no obligation to tell people your day job. And you don’t need to confess that you want to be a designer but the only thing you’ve designed is the web page that says you’re a designer. Everyone starts somewhere. Bill Gates sold his first computer before he had manufactured one. He did that by saying that he does it and then someone hired him to do it. This is fair play – even expected play – in business.

So you need a business card that says what you want to be doing, if you are ready to start doing it. If you are doing two things and they are related, like designer and illustrator, you can put a slash on the card. If you are doing things that are unrelated, like designer and travel agent, then have two separate cards. This way, when someone is going on a trip, you can give them the travel agent card. If designer is also on the card then it looks like you are less focused on travel, whether or not it’s true, so leave it off. In this sense the card is like a resume – it’s not your life story; just put on the card what you want to get hired to do.

You can do fine with a very basic business card, and there are plenty of places to order these online. But here is a site with really incredible business cards, that I spent way too much time looking at. (Thanks, Marina.) But before you go there, a word of caution: The wrong font can ruin your image in one second. So don’t get fancy unless you know how.

And hey, if you still have a corporate day job as well, don’t forget to carry around cards for that, too – until you can quit.

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In today’s workplace, young job seekers hold the advantage

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Companies are having a hard time recruiting and retaining young talent, and as a result are accommodating what would have once been considered extreme demands. “The scales have tipped in favor of knowledge workers, creating a seller’s market for the next 5 to 10 years,” writes to Stan Smith, National Director of Next Generation Initiatives at Deloitte.

Here are some reasons why so many younger workers have gained the advantage when it comes to negotiating the terms of a new job.

The workforce is shrinking.
The Department of Labor reports that from 2000 to 2010 there will be a 30 percent decrease of workers in their 30s and 40s. In addition, many Generation X parents are choosing to leave the workforce or cut back on hours in order to be home with their children. This trend is so pronounced that it’s creating a shortage of managers already.

Many young people want their own businesses.
The barriers to starting an Internet business are low. Viral marketing via a personal e-mail list and a few key mentions on prominent blogs can potentially catapult a good idea into a successful business. Since young people can effectively fund their own companies this way, many do not want to pay their dues by working for someone else and learning the ropes. The flexibility of owning a company is not only appealing, but also a way to avoid menial labor at the bottom of the corporate ladder. In fact, many young people are choosing the excitement of entrepreneurship over the stability of a good salary.

If entrepreneurship is the first choice, a corporate job is a backup plan. Matt Humphrey, 20, and three friends just founded SlapVid, a company that cuts the cost of providing video content online. Humphrey thinks of the MBA program he is now in as sort of a backup plan in case SlapVid does not take off at the end of the summer. And in the event that he does not have another idea for a company before he graduates, getting a job at someone else’s company is a second-level backup plan.

Parents are a safety net.
More than 50 percent of college graduates will move back home with their parents this summer. And most parents will like it. It used to be that returning home after college was seen as a sign of failure. Today, however, economists and sociologists see such homecomings as a smart response to exorbitant housing prices in big cities, and entry-level wages that do not cover living expenses.

Three out of four of the founders of SlapVid are getting financial help from their parents. And Humphrey’s parents are typical in their enthusiasm for their child’s adventure, and the tight relationship they share. “They know they might have to support me for longer than they planned for,” Humphrey said. “They’re definitely up for that. If I want to do something really, really cool, they’ll support me all the way. They call me every day to see how I’m doing.”

With such parental support, there is no need for a company to play the parenting role, which is what happened when baby boomers entered the workforce. And if there is no paternalism in corporate life, it becomes a scramble to figure out what businesses can leverage to scoop up young employees.

The intimidation factor is diminished.
“People going to college today are working harder than I ever did in school,” says Bill MacGowan, chief human resources officer of Sun Microsystems. “These kids will find work easier than I did.” In return for their effort, they expect to be well compensated by employers. As consummate consumers, they use technology to customize the way they view information, and they expect the same kind of customization when it comes to selecting jobs. They negotiate for vacation time, mentoring and training, flexible schedules, and even tricked-out laptops.

And when it comes to negotiating, young people assume the adults at the office are on their side. Generation Y has been raised by parents who often acted more like friends and mentors. In fact, often a wide community was involved in helping a Generation Y child succeed — including teachers, coaches, and private tutors. As a result, young people bring unprecedented confidence to the negotiating table. Some even have their parents in the room for added help, and many respected companies are willing to engage parents in the hiring process if that’s what the candidate wants.

Indeed, the scales have tipped and young people are in charge. For people who have been in the workforce for a long time and expected to be in charge, the new reality is difficult to accept. But it’s possible all employees will benefit from some of the changes. After all, demands such as more flexible schedules, are appealing to all employees, regardless of age.

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