Do Young Entrepreneurs Still Want To Change The World?

When I decided to become an entrepreneur, a streak that always lay dormant in me, one of the criteria I had when Ilooking at a business is, is it changing the world in some small way? That's always been my goal is to create something that is better than what has existed in the past. Most notably, my first real, true start up, not including my previous failed businesses, is Surface Medical Spas, which, from the beginning, was designed to change the way cosmetic medicine is practiced and delivered. The current medical system is totally antiquated and inefficient, and Surface brings efficiency to the marketplace based upon technology, not individual physicians' skills.

My current start up, Nimble, is designed to replace advertising and marketing for local small businesses. It is designed to bring hyper-competition into the marketplace and allow any business to manage its own inventory in real time by selling its unused inventory at a discount directly to the public or some other small business; that is a cool deal.

It surprises me personally when I meet entrepreneurs whose only goal in life is to make money by what I see as less than purely ethical or idealistic reasons.

I recently ran across an entrepreneur at a gathering who was truly excited about his new business. He had come out of UVSC Entrepreneurial Program and one of his assignments had been to start a new business. The business he had started was an online ppc business, and he was very proud that he was making about $1,000 a month doing it. His business consisted of purchasing a domain, running up the rankings using SEO, providing a bunch of ppc text links at a dead end, and, from my opinion, tricking browsing consumers into clicking one of these ad-links. That was his business model.

Businesses like this irritate me to some degree because they add nothing. They just skim a little bit of money by unsuspecting businesses and people (I routinely categorize realtors in this category as well).

My own feeling is that if you are going to run a business and expect people to pay you money that you should be actually adding value. Just providing dead links so that somebody is tricked into clicking on them, adds zero value and to be honest I think is at least cloudy on the ethical front. I know many business owners that will do anything for a buck. Potentially, if I had one of these sites, I might think about that as well. I do have sites that run adwords and I do make a little bit of money off of them, at least enough to pay my bills, to keep the sites up and going. But to provide no content, I think is just scummy.

Where are the young radicals out to change the world and stick it to the man?