State of the New Economy

Dion Lim

Startup Junkie
San Francisco, California

A while back, I got a call from a friend at Morgan Stanley. He is the most risk-averse, least entrepreneurial person I've ever known. Suddenly, he was acting all hyper. "I want to get into this Internet thing," he said to me. "It sounds like there's money to be made."

I don't get calls like that anymore. The correction last April did a lot to settle people down, to pull their heads out of the clouds. And that's great, because now people can get down to business and focus on ideas.

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. When my parents came to the United States from China, they came with nothing. They were classic entrepreneurs. In today's world, I have so much more opportunity to live out the life of an entrepreneur fully. Self-determination promises to be the metric for success in the new economy.

The downside is that people might mistake self-indulgence for self-determination. Wasn't it Thomas Edison who said that success is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration"? I don't want my generation to go down in history as one that was all about lifestyle, hubris, and greed.

Dion Lim (dion@juicetalent.com) has been a founder or an executive of five startups. His newest venture is Juice Inc., a high-touch talent agency dedicated to helping people design and fulfill their own destinies.