As a recent New York magazine article on social media declared, the tech startup frenzy that began in the 1990s is far from over. Startup companies of any sort, generally defined as such once they have undergone at least one round of angel investing, can seem to be everywhere. HerCampus, in an attempt to parlay female empowerment and useful career knowledge, published "Young, Fabulous and Jobless: Ann Baldinucci on Unemployment and Entrepreneurship," which reflects on the current economy as more incentive to be an entrepreneur. Asked where Ann, the founder of NabeWise, a website that provides detailed information on neighborhoods in America’s biggest cities, expects to be in five years? “I’d like to start building up a second start-up!”

Without ignoring the more energy-sucking aspects of startups (you will sleep at your desk), the article provides a more straightforwardly upbeat take on the current economy than, say, Yelena Shuster’s Ivyleaguedandunemployed blog – a Columbia grad’s observations about the current job market and living circumstances of those seeking employment from, uh, established companies (see: “Hire my friend: the Spanish lit major stuck in Arizona” or “4 Reasons not to sleep with the unemployed”). Considering the difficulty many recent graduates and current students have with finding jobs in today’s market, it ought to come as no surprise that the enterprising among us have taken this “opportunity” to try to turn their ideas into dolla dolla bills. Baldinucci’s zeal to build a “second” startup once she establishes the first, however, implies something beyond necessity as an impetus to dive into the “sea of uncertainty” (as she puts it) that is starting your own business. There seems to be a certain adrenaline addiction to the phenomenon of startups.

Or at least to what people think of as startups. Technically, the term refers to any business that is sustained but started recently  – which includes the Japanese restaurants in my hometown (less glamorous, but tastier, if unfortunately named after World War II carnage sites) as well as Facebook three years ago. In the early 20^th century, New York's “startups” were the delis started by second-generation immigrants that are now synonymous with the city’s character. Now, however, the term is often associated with more privileged college students who already have capital at hand to gamble on ideas that are often as quixotic or indulgent as they might be virally successful.

But how are college students harnessing the momentum of the movement, and are our expectations reasonable? How many college students wear “startups” or other creative ventures as a badge of honor? And what about those kids who create “companies” or “organizations” in college only to be hired by those with enduring corporate structures? Do so many people actually believe their “creativity” translates to good business? Do that many people have the nerve, or is it another indulgence of Generation Y? Why?

To begin, it depends on how you envision the relationship between your perceived creativity and the workings of the world at large.  

In 1971, Richard Brautigan published a book called The Abortion. While the premise does contain something of, as its subtitle suggests, “an Historical Romance,” it is perhaps just as notable for Brautigan’s dreamy reimagining of the Presidio Branch of the San Francisco Public Library, where patrons bring in their own books. They don’t check them out.

In fact, no one really checks them out.

Conjured by a silver bell, the narrator and librarian floats to the front desk to receive "the unwanted, the lyrical and haunted volumes of American writing." Not unlike Dartmouth students near exam time, he sleeps in the library. His is a set-up based as much on the premise that the arrival of ideas, like children, must not be constrained by a normal schedule, that they must be treated with the urgency they deserve. The librarian then catalogues them by placing the book, which may be anything from old folks’ memoirs to children’s smudges of their imaginary worlds – ideas which cannot be deemed objectively “bad” so much as unprofitable for a normal literary market – on whatever shelf seems, according to the his own caprice or intuition, best suited for its home.

While Brautigan’s library for unwanted ideas – or to use a more egalitarian expression, for “everyone” – may be as much a whimsical response to big-name publishing houses’ refusal to print his novels as it is 1960s genre parody, it is not without “real life” implications.  In Britain, The Library of Unwritten Books, a project inspired by Brautigan’s book, collects ideas “for books people would like to write – but never have and probably never will.” More pertinent to the topic of entrepreneurship, the library soothes some of its patrons’ mental racket about finding a purpose in life: like earning enough to have a large nest-egg or doing well in business, it can convince its authors that they have accomplished something meaningful and enduring. If you can monetize and market your ideas to the appropriate venture capitalists or angel investors, you will be successful. If you feel as though you are creating something valuable using your own ideas, you might even feel fulfilled – or, well, at least you’ll be hip.

After speaking with porteños in Buenos Aires this term, one may get the impression that many Argentines have the intention of writing a novella. This shouldn't be that surprising, considering the sheer quantity of bookstores in the city. In the States, by contrast, it often seems that many people – especially young, educated people – have the intention of translating their perceived creativity into some lucrative business with the market savvy that we are all, of course, born with. At least, such is the carrot that the media buzz over the current wave of tech start-ups dangles in front of our noses. Even sexier for the socially conscious among us, YOU the entrepreneur could be useful to society without medical school or corporate recruiting.  

When asked about how he perceived startups, a Dartmouth ’11 casually commented, “Well, I know a friend of mine who started one freshman year. Helped to get him a job for the summer.” He continued by saying that he had “started a non-profit in freshman year,” and that it provided “good, relevant management skills” and “an excellent way to apply your creativity.” Not once did he mention what it actually accomplished – perhaps a signal that starting one’s own company or non-profit is, as with many Dartmouth students’ leadership positions, just another stamp to put on the resume. The sheer number of student organizations that disappear after the “founding president” graduates corroborates this.

Considering such vagaries, Victoria Stevenson, University of Georgia ’12, is rightfully apprehensive about startups for much of her fellow students’ talk-to-business ratio but cites their more generally-accepted motivations – making profit – as a reason to try it.

“Out of my friends, none have really found success in the startup arena. Many are students looking for an inventive way to make money. I would agree that with the rise in the popularity of Twitter, Facebook, and the like, it seems that one is accomplishing a lot by ‘talking’ about his companies via these outlets, but that is not necessarily the case. I think for beta-testing and feeling out the need or interest, these outlets are valid, but not as a sole marketing or operating tool.”

Inventive they are. Dartmouth has recently seen companies crop up to challenge Dartmouth Dining Services’ hegemony - or, as Zach Gottlieb dramatically refers to its wilderness monopoly in a recent D article, “totalitarian dystopia.” This is to say, student companies do exist that have a reason to be successful.

Thanks to Robbie Krattiger’s Hanover Bucks, for example, the card with "fake money" that we swipe no longer has to be our student ID. No, you don’t have to pay $7.00 for a sandwich in Thayer (I mean, where is Homeplate moving again?) – you can pay slightly less for one with thinly-sliced deli meats and “ambience” at Dirt Cowboy (!).

Although another company cropped up to deliver bulk quantities of drinks to our dorms, I am still waiting for the grocery delivery system from Kmart in West Leb so that I don’t have to buy the Co-op’s gourmet food just because it’s the closest place I can get on foot.

As these companies - as well as the two (!) competing futon & fridge rentals - demonstrate, using Facebook and Twitter for marketing is unnecessary when you have the Dartmouth Name Directory and our almost hermetically-sealed community as a pool of consumers. But outside the Bubble, markets are more difficult to assess. 

Betty Jin, Dartmouth ’11 and current head of Women in Business, notes that in the real world, there is a lot more losing than winning going on before you succeed in business. When venture-capital firms sponsor a new company, they usually only have 7-9 companies, “3 of them they know will go bust, 3 of them they know will go alright, and 1 to 3 they know will hit the jackpot. They’re looking for the Facebooks, the Googles…” Something that can monetize with ad revenue or information vending to marketing companies, like Foursquare does when it rewards people for “exploring their neighborhoods.” With such positive reinforcement, deliberately choosing to play the flâneur is so, like, 19^th century.  Or romantic in a “developing world,” wish-we-weren’t-so-connected kind of way. Why wander aimlessly when you don’t have to?

“Few startups realize that a lot of successful startups go through a few project companies, that go bust, before they become successful – because there wasn’t a great execution process, not enough funding, the team left.” A budding entrepreneur has to pay rent, give his workers equity or wages for a company that hasn’t been successful yet, invest in new computer programs “that are more hi-tech than, say, PowerPoint." "You need to put a lot of money aside just for travel because if you’re based in NY a lot of the venture capitalists are based on the West coast.”

Jin’s CEO at NabeWise travels frequently for this reason. But where training in risky business doesn’t come cheap, what is the incentive when one could work a relatively cozy corporate or finance job where the $10 million you risk in bonds would never personally affect your living conditions?

“Most people also say that being an entrepreneur is more of a profession than a mindset – if you were born, well, raised with the ability to stomach risk or look for these opportunities.” Betty observes.

Most people where? Evolution, yes, would seem to favor those who can “compete,” as so many arguments for capitalism go, but is the inculcation the same across all countries? Perhaps not.

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In my third grade class in Georgia, for example, we had a unit called “minisociety.” In it we ran our own “businesses,” took inventory and made profit projections. We also learned how to balance a checkbook (knowledge which is not nearly as practical now as they are becoming obsolete, but c’est la vie). I am pretty certain that my inventory included painted pumpkins, which were successful despite their absurdity thanks to parental clemency and third-graders’ alternative definition of what is “useful” or good to have.

Later that year, I listed as part of my thirty-item “Wish List for the World,” that it would be free of not only “misleading TV shows” and “overpriced stores” (thanks Mom) but “communism.” There is no way I, as an 8-year-old, would have seriously thought out the differences between capitalism, communism, socialism, Islamic economics, or any ways to distribute capital or shared risk in society. I doubt that I would have connected my attitudes towards our yearly Easter egg hunts, during which I was chastised for my recalcitrance in paying my share of Easter egg “dues” when I found more than other kids who were not as quick on the hunt, to any particular posture in this matter – tantamount to tax evasion though they may seem. My solution, knowing that they were going to be redistributed, was to swap the candies inside for the ones I considered prime finds and return to the teacher the eggs which contained candies that were clearly only there because they came in the economy-sized bags teachers bought to save money – like tootsie rolls. Fortunately or not, this does not work outside the barter system.

Outside of sheer instinct and greed, however, I was parroting what I had been told – if not in school, then from my grandparents.  This zest for teaching our children the values of entrepreneurship is not limited to red states, however: Natasha Zarinsky, Dartmouth ’11, once participated in a similar unit during her tenure in the New York City school systems.

Much like my pumpkins (and the painted rocks I tried to market as “paperweights” to my neighborhood shortly after that unit), many “startup” ideas can be indulgent or feeble ways to channel one’s creativity. Without veering too much into hazy freakonomics, the fact that many public schools, under pressure from budget cuts, have eighty-sixed their arts programs in a tough economy means students will look for other ways to express themselves and learn “marketable” skills – not to mention make a few bucks. Considering our early inculcation, that we might choose business or consider ourselves savvy without having actual experience ought not come as a surprise. Couple that with media distortion of the number of companies being "started" and it seems like everyone's got one – how hard can it be?

A look at Ivy Insider’s media pack echoes the sentiment: the promise of money downplays all sense of realism or responsibility for how difficult it actually is to set up a test center, market it, and make profit. While it has been successful due to branding and its founders' business acumen, starting a company – or dare I say, organization – is not for everyone. More often than not, your ideas will collect dust, like the The Abortion´s spiral-note memoirs about plants, in an archive more indulgent than useful.

If you are willing to take the risk, however, by all means. My world is made more convenient by your efforts. In any event, DDS could use a little more competition.