Venture capital

Forget Zoom college: it’s time for America’s youth to embrace entrepreneurship

In the fall, thousands of college campuses across the country could be set to move online. Students will find themselves paying amounts in excess of $40,000 a year for glorified Zoom sessions. Even more young professionals will be considering grad school as a way to ride out the biggest recession we’ve seen in a generation. It will be grad school with all the cost and hardly any of the networking benefits. But there’s another option: we can build. We can use the crisis and the move online as a reason to take risks, risks that once seemed crazy or impractical are suddenly worthwhile. Whether it’s making leaps in genetic engineering or learning how to practically homestead, building is acceptable again.

zoom class

How digital media killed itself

As a young digital journalist in the late 2000s, my industry peers and I often reminisced about the era we felt we’d just missed: the glamorous, fin-de-siècle age of New York media, the time of seven-figure budgets for magazine launches and outsize editorial personalities that commanded celebrity attention in New York. We were the ones scrambling to keep our jobs afloat in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. As it turns out, we still had it pretty good. The other evening, right after the brutal layoffs at digital publications such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost were announced, I found myself in a dive bar (of course) with a handful of the aforementioned elder millennials of digital media.

buzzfeed digital media