The Time Has Come For The College Entrepreneur

America’s youth unemployment is at an all-time high these days. Studies and reports are showing numbers that are scary, depressing, and downright desperate. A Huffington Post article last summer pegged the number of 16–24 year olds who are unemployed at 51.1%. Things have improved a bit since, but the scale of the problem is still staggering.

We need the high schools and colleges in particular to step up and teach practical aspects of an entrepreneurial way of life to their students, and set expectations that kids and young adults will need to take destiny in their own hands.

Role models abound. Take our recent story of Mike Mothner who started WPromote as a computer science student at Dartmouth. Today, Mike runs a $10 million company and has built it without any external financing.

Or, take the college bootstrapping buddies who founded Grasshopper – Siamak Taghaddos And David Hauser. The duo also runs a substantial company that is doing well above $10 million today, and was founded when they met at Babson College.

I would love to hear from more of you at various schools and colleges who are working on entrepreneurial projects. Please introduce yourselves, and we’ll see how we can support your work through the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative.

And since we’ve also started hearing from teenagers who are starting businesses, here are a few good role models: Scott Wainner, now a serial entrepreneur in his early thirties started at 15.

And Kevin Splores started Volusion at 16, and today runs one of the largest e-commerce platform companies in the world.

Last but not the least, we have Caleb Sima, an Internet Security genius, also a child entrepreneur who has seen huge success.