The Startup Bug Strikes Earlier

Business Week:

There was a time, not so long ago, when a person choosing the entrepreneurial career path wasn’t exactly greeted with rampant enthusiasm. Among the notable exceptions: Michael Dell famously started his eponymous computer company out of his University of Texas, Austin, dorm room. And what would eventually become software behemoth Microsoft began life when Bill Gates was still a Harvard undergrad.

Both men eventually dropped out of college to pursue their wildly successful ventures, but their paths to fame and fortune were decidedly not the norm. For the most part, and for the rest of us, conventional wisdom held that to be successful, one got a degree or two and then worked for an established company. Tinkering and dreaming was left to — ahem — entrepreneurs, not serious businesspeople.

That was then. Nowadays, “Entrepreneur is no longer a dirty word,” says Gerald Hills, an entrepreneurship professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and executive director of the Collegiate Entrepreneur’s Organization, a network of student groups on 500 college campuses. “It’s nearly what everyone thinks of when they think about opportunities. They think of entrepreneurs now.” Shorn of its stigma, the once-risky career route is now viewed as a positive calling, particularly given the wobbly economy and the no-longer-sacrosanct benefits of corporate life — pensions and job security are fast becoming relics of a bygone era.

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