| So I was born in '84 and I've been following YC since it launched in 2005. I think there are actually a few unique things about this generation: - Grew up reading Slashdot, steeped in the values and beliefs of the OSS community. - Were coming of age during the golden age of blogging ('05-'06) when people with a lot of industry experience were making their insights widely available for the first time. E.g. during the beginning of college when we were all trying to figure out what to do with our lives, suddenly the knowledge of how and why to do a startup became available. - Coming of age when not suddenly it became possible (but before it easy) to build software that reached a billion people and changed the world. - Coming of age during the birth of marketing 2.0 -- The Cluetrain Manifesto, Seth Godin, Kathy Sierra, Hugh McCleod, etc. - Coming of age during the birth of Web 2.0, when suddenly every web business needed to be rebuilt around new design principles, technology (AJAX), and promotional techniques. - Around for the birth of Y Combinator and The Facebook. - Impossible to get a job with any possible upward mobility when graduating. Most of this was happening our sophomore/junior year in college, when suddenly we knew all of this really important world-changing stuff that almost no one with established careers was paying attention to yet. So yeah, I'm sure our generation isn't unique and wasn't the only one affected by these things, but I do think they probably had a disproportionate impact on us. |