The “Founder” Generation’s Creation Myth
To found is not to manage; it’s to dream and to design. This is the new model for innovative business, scrupulously cleansed of the dank trappings of corporate industry. It’s business all the same, though, and it aims for growth.
.. Then we get some clips from interviews, in which the kids discuss the qualities that set them apart from the world that came before. “We’re all more connected to people around the world—we know more about what’s going on around the world—because of technology,” one girl says. “In past generations, it’s been advised to fit in, in order to get by in life, but now the more you stand out, the more celebrated you’ll be,” another explains. At the same time, at least according to a boy interviewed, “people are mostly united in different things. They don’t feel alone anymore.”
.. The real challenges of the country that the founders will inherit won’t be apparent at the points of great achievement and high flight, though. They are likely to come in the crowded middle and below, among the undistinguished and uncelebrated—places where differences can’t be burnished by exceptionalism. What are the founders’ plans for being different together when they are not also special? “Our generation will be marked as the foundation that really set off what’s most likely going to happen in the next fifty to a hundred years,” one interviewee says. “We are the founders because we are the ones that are transitioning from before to what’s going to come after.”