Have Young Entrepreneurs Become Less Ambitious?
This article was machine-translated from Japanese by AI (Claude). It may contain errors. Read the original Japanese article.
People sometimes say that "the ambitions of young people aspiring to start businesses have shrunk," but personally I feel that not much has changed over the past decade.
Rather, my own view is that a special set of circumstances was in place not long ago, and that people could take on big bets even without lofty ambitions.
Until the mid-2010s, starting up in software opened the way to the world
Around 2005, when Web 2.0 was gaining momentum, I have the impression that the naive idea that "the world is becoming flatter, and even services built by young people or individuals can be used by people all over the world" was more widely shared than it is today. Gmail had just appeared, individuals could actively put out their own messages through blogs and the like, and it seems to me that this was a time when a forward-looking, bright view of the internet was dominant.
That was also the time when young entrepreneurs, starting with Google's two co-founders and Facebook's Zuckerberg, were emerging one after another. People could see and hear real examples of people their own age who were actually changing the world in a big way, and many probably thought, "I want to be like that."
Then, in 2010, the film The Social Network, with Facebook and Zuckerberg at its center, was released, and many young people seem to have been influenced by it. The film itself was about the Web 2.0 era and its surrounding trends, and although Web 2.0 itself had cooled somewhat by the time of its release, the waves of HTML5 and smartphones arrived at just the right moment, so people who were fired up by the film could also take on new markets (in Japan, social games on feature phones took off before smartphones did).
In those days, these fields had few regulations, effective new channels were beginning to appear, and scaling up was relatively easy. Moreover, web programming was relatively easy to get started with, and there were few veterans from older generations, so it seems to me that it was an era and a field with many opportunities for young people to play an active role.
Looking back like this, from around 2005 to around 2015, it was, I think, an era in which, whether or not you had ambition, you could to some extent believe the story that if you started developing a product in the software field, the world awaited beyond it, and in fact there were real chances like that.
And in that era, it seems to me that a high-growth startup-style business was directly continuous with the extension of a business that began as a personal project or a small business.
Changes in the environment
However, the number of people interested in this field has increased sharply compared to the past, so competition has intensified. Social media, once an inexpensive channel, is also starting to get crowded. The giants known as Big Tech hold vast computing resources and channels and have established monopolistic positions. Startups have also increased around the world, and to spread, one now has to win through fierce competition.
As the field has become crowded, "building something people want" has also become difficult, and now that being "software" alone makes it hard to scale, I feel that the likelihood has grown that the methods of the past alone will leave you with a small business.
Thinking about it that way, the roughly fifteen years in which an environment existed where young people and world-scale business were easily connected directly can be said to have been very special. So rather than saying that young people's ambitions have become lower, I think it is closer to the truth that there happened to be an era in which you could aim for the world regardless of how high or low your ambition was.
Nurturing big ambitions has become more important
If ambitions have not become lower and are not that different from before, does that mean everything is fine? Not at all.
If the size of young people's ambitions has indeed not changed, that means that the education and support during that time failed to raise their ambitions, or that we failed to change the environment surrounding young people.
And I also think that today, to "achieve something big" in the field of entrepreneurship, the ambition and knowledge required have become relatively higher than before. If so, then to increase the number of people with greater ambition and vision, changes are needed in education and support methods as well.
Of course, I don't think everyone needs to have big ambitions. There are many people who are doing all they can just to get by.
On the other hand, I hope that people who have reached the elite, people in privileged positions, and people who have built great wealth once will hold high aspirations, such as contributing to the public and to society, rather than maximizing their own interests, and I think it is important to create an environment in which they can hold such aspirations (though I am not saying they should devote everything to the public good).
Maximizing self-interest may be better for one's individual life, and if you do nothing, nothing happens, and you may be able to live a peaceful life. But it is the ambition to seek justice beyond personal gain, and the ambition to produce scientific discoveries, that has led to humanity's prosperity today.
To move society forward, we need a certain number of such highly ambitious people. I personally hope we can do something so that there will be at least a few more such people, or so that even those who are not themselves like that can create an environment that supports highly ambitious people, and I hope to shape what I do into a form that can show some kind of model.