The next Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, or Steve Jobs
Mar 22, 2010, 2:47 AM | Updated: Mar 28, 2011, 3:46 pm
30 years ago if you knew everything there was to know about a computer, you were a geek or a nerd. Computer geeks Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs changed the world. They gave us a computer on every desktop, shopping at our fingertips, and mobile entertainment and communication.
Today there’s a new kind of entrepreneur. He or she is influenced not only by computers, but by social and mobile media.
Siamak Taghaddos is co-founder and CEO of Grasshopper, which provides virtual phone systems and other services to entrepreneurs. His company produced the video below about what he jokingly calls “the new dorks.”
Now I’m in the blogosphere, Now I’m in the twitterverse
Fans get so immersed, But I’m a nerd forever
I’m the new Zuckerberg, And since my website
I been cookin dough like a chef servin killa-bytes
Used to be the basement, Back at my mom’s place
Buildin web traffic so that we could sell an ad space
Make way for the, One man businesses
Bail outs finished with, White collar criminals
New sega genesis, Entrepreneur time
Makin big plans, To dominate the online
“The new dork is somebody who is socially out there, and able to have fun and is online,” Taghaddos says. “I think it’s a combination of being socially cool and understanding the internet, and being able to run a company.”
Social media is the next big tech bubble, and Taghaddos tells me it could be awhile before most people embrace the concept.
“To actually use social media to your advantage and get some benefit out of it, I think there’s another year, year and a half left before everyone gets it,” Taghaddos says.
He also says there’s never been an easier time start your own business because so many companies (including his) support entrepreneurs. With the challenging infrastructure part of running your own business out of the way, entrepreneurs can focus on their ideas and products or services.
“You’re going to see a lot more innovation coming out of entrepreneurs than you have in the past,” he says.
The strongest example of the “new dorks” is the kid who created Facebook, 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook now has more than 400 million active users. To put that number in perspective. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third most populous in the world behind India and China.
Locally, one “new dork” who comes to mind is Ben Huh, an Internet content connoisseur in Seattle. He’s the guy who made I Can Has Cheezburger what it is. Yes, the site with the cat pictures and funny captions is silly, but he’s getting 1.5 million hits per day. He’s also behind Fail Blog and a number of other projects.
