Washington — “Today’s youth has access to better information than Bill Clinton did,” said tech innovator Vivek Wadwha. “Today, within seconds, you hear about what’s happening everywhere in the world.”
Before he became a voice of change and innovation in the tech industry, Vivek Wadwha was the founder of two successful startup tech companies. Today, he advises startup companies, is a fellow at Stanford law school, director of research at Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and a columnist for a number of business publications.
In 2010, Wadwha worked with the government of Chile to develop Start-Up Chile, a program to attract innovators with new business ideas and encourage them to use Chile as a platform for going global. “In many Latin American countries if you start a business, you’re basically at the bottom rung. It’s often better to be a government bureaucrat than to be an entrepreneur. We need to infuse a new culture of entrepreneurship,” Wadwha said.
But now, he said, “the social attitudes about entrepreneurship [are] changing. This is a common trend I’m seeing in many countries in the world, that the youth are different, because the youth have been brought up in a connected world. They go on Facebook, they read tech blogs in the United States. They really are much more open-minded and much more knowledgeable than their parents ever were.”
“One of the advantages of the tech world is that it doesn’t take much capital to create a startup,” Wadwha said. “Web-based apps and so on, these are things that kids can build while they’re still living with their parents. It doesn’t cost much. It’s become an equalizer.”
Young innovators are the same worldwide, Wadwha said. “In Silicon Valley, the first-time entrepreneurs make the same mistakes over and over again,” Wadwha said. “The difference between Silicon Valley and [the rest of the world] is that in Silicon Valley you have mentors who can help you. Social media and the Web can help with that.”