Superconnector

INTRODUCTION

WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ANYTHING WE HAVE TO SAY

Because the two of us have lived exactly what we are preaching.

We were introduced in 2010 through a mutual friend, Dan Schawbel, who’s made a big name for himself as an expert on millennials and the workplace. We each knew Schawbel through our own individual channels; he is a big-league connector and insisted we meet. Obviously, he had no idea what the exact outcome would be, but he definitely suspected something good would come of it. He was right. Both of our lives changed with that one introduction.

After graduating from Penn State in 2006, Ryan had taken the first job he could get: at a top pharmaceutical company in his home state of New Jersey, where there are as many pharma companies as there are strip malls. He sat down at a cubicle every day, collected a reasonable paycheck for a wet-behind-the-ears college grad, but was… miserable.

He wasn’t alone. His lifelong friend and freshman-year roommate, Ryan Healy (people referred to them as “the Ryans”), was sitting in a cubicle down in Washington, DC, feeling equally demoralized by his first job. They complained to each other often about how unhappy they were. Eventually, the Ryans decided to do something about it.

They realized that if they were going to be in jobs that were financially stable but soul deadening, they might as well use that stability to “moonlight our own destinies,” as Ryan (Paugh) puts it.

Blogging was just becoming trendy, especially among Gen X and baby-boomer recruiters, hiring managers, and HR professionals who were just starting to add Generation Y and millennials (like the Ryans) to their teams. But they were having difficulty working with this new breed of worker, and that angst found its way onto their blogs. These young upstarts were “Narcissistic.” “Entitled.” “Disloyal.” Newspapers and magazine articles—along with books like Generation Me—were dedicated to lambasting the group. “But nobody from our generation was speaking up,” says Ryan. The Ryans decided to create a blog, Employee Evolution, to be that voice.

They blogged about the clash of generations in the workforce from their perspective, defended their peers, and attempted to debunk the stereotypes associated with us. People started to take notice. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times ran features on them; Morley Safer anchored a segment on 60 Minutes.

And a funny thing happened: They discovered that they weren’t alone in their dissatisfaction with the status quo of the working world. Nor were they the only ones who resented the generational stereotypes. They met with and supported a number of bloggers, many of whom became good friends, who shared their beliefs. One of whom was a woman named Penelope Trunk.

Trunk, a Gen Xer, had written a book called Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success, a career guide for Gen Y. It became so popular that it spawned a column in the Boston Globe and a controversial career blog that’s still around today, but she was looking to do something bigger with the brand. That’s where the Ryans came on the scene.

Trunk didn’t know what she wanted to do next with her brand, but she knew she wanted it to be a startup and that she didn’t want to do it alone. She found Employee Evolution through seeing them comment frequently on her blog (they were huge fans). She wanted the Ryans to be her partners in her next venture.

Together, they created Brazen Careerist 2.0: an online community for young professionals entering the workforce to share their challenges and frustrations and offer each other support. The bloggers they had befriended earlier, along with the ones they met through Employee Evolution, became their anchors (more about anchors later). In 2009 Mashable had dubbed their little startup “one of the top social networking destinations for Gen Y.”

Flash-forward to 2010. The Ryans were now living in Madison, Wisconsin, where Trunk lived with her family (because when you’re in your early twenties and your partner has two kids, a husband, and a home, you go where she tells you to). They had raised more than $1 million in funding, and they brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the Brazen Careerist platform. But they weren’t making any money. As Ryan puts it, “We had to make a big change, or—as startup folk like to call it when you have to go back to the drawing board—a pivot.”

They had to bring in new leadership. One of their lead investors and a seasoned CEO who believed in them stepped in. Brazen Careerist was beginning to take new shape as a software-as-a-service platform providing speed networking opportunities helping recruiters and job seekers, students and alumni at universities, and any other A-B combination you can think of connect online. It was a brazen move inspired by the phenomenon of Chat Roulette (yes, the one with all the creepy naked people).

And something unexpected: the company started making money! They brought on big-name clients, and the company was reborn as a SaaS technology play: Brazen Technologies.

As thrilled as Ryan was to see the company he cofounded start to see some success, he also started feeling like his time at Brazen was coming to an end. He was (and still is) a community builder at heart, and he felt like he couldn’t contribute the best parts of himself to the team.

One afternoon he sat on a beach in Chatham, Massachusetts, with his friend Dan Schawbel. That’s when his life changed. Schawbel suggested that he connect with an entrepreneur named Scott Gerber, who was working on something that was right up his alley. Scott had studied film at New York University, and while he was still in college he became a very successful producer. He knew nothing about business—he relied on Google to help him decipher terms like P&L. His family couldn’t help him; they weren’t entrepreneurs or moguls. He had no formal mentors or advisers to counsel him on what he was doing right or wrong; he relied on instinct, salesmanship, wagonloads of naïveté, and… his Type A chutzpah.

He created a viable business and managed to make a lot of money his junior year—which he promptly lost a year later, largely because he was a rookie, made stupid mistakes, and had no network around him to help him deal with the business challenges he faced. At that moment he made himself a promise. He never wanted another entrepreneur to experience the same feelings of loneliness or lack of support that he had. He never wanted another young businessperson to go blindly without a network or any other connections, as he had. He vowed that if he ever found financial success, he would create a group where like-minded young entrepreneurs could help each other solve the types of challenges he faced.

After graduation in 2005—to the chagrin of his “real job” touting family—he took the last seven hundred dollars to his name and built another company, called Sizzle It!, which produced promotional videos (or “sizzle reels”) for PR and marketing firms. He learned from past mistakes, and it did quite well. It generated substantial profits and had a who’s who client roster of many of the world’s largest brands and advertising agencies.

Two years later he made good on his promise, and the first iteration of the Young Entrepreneur Council, commonly known today as YEC, was born.

In 2010, after the recession hit, Scott began sharing his story with universities and youth entrepreneurship groups. He felt students could relate to him as a peer and find value and inspiration in his journey. After all, he was only a few years older than the students he was speaking to.

Then the media came a-knocking, which caught the attention of dozens of young entrepreneurs from around the country. The message resonated with them, and many would end up reaching out to him and joining him as he continued to speak with students and youth groups. As the press interest around youth entrepreneurship and the Young Entrepreneur Council hit fever pitch, Scott broadened the concept yet again. He began asking up-and-coming entrepreneurs from around the country to send him their business questions and challenges. He would then funnel them to his newly assembled group of successful entrepreneurs, who would answer those questions. He then partnered with several of the media outlets who had been covering his efforts, such as Inc. magazine, Time, and the Wall Street Journal, and published his group’s collective responses in their publications.

As more questions and more press outlets wanted to take part, Scott continued reaching out to other successful entrepreneurs his age to join his group. They, in turn, introduced him to people in their networks. One of them was named… Dan Schawbel.

After a month’s worth of back-and-forth, Ryan and Scott finally got on the phone. We clicked big-time. That’s when things got serious. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, my business advice is being shared alongside advice from Alexis Ohanian, the cofounder of Reddit!’” Ryan recalls. “There had to be something more we could do with this group.” Ryan started flying into Manhattan from Madison regularly, and we’d walk around the city all day long, talking about building the next great entrepreneurial organization. We ate more Panera Bread than we could handle but burned off the carbs just as quickly with every step we took while formulating our vision.

Together, we realized that it was possible to do both good and well at the same time. First and foremost, we wanted to help other people with their businesses. But we also wanted to be able to create enough value for ourselves to ensure that the Young Entrepreneur Council wouldn’t become just another one of Startupland’s failed meet-up groups due to lack of care and management. It wasn’t easy. We both worried: Would people want what we offered in a formal manner? Would they be willing to pay for it?

The answer, we discovered, was yes.

We didn’t realize how much value we’d been creating or how valuable we were to other people. (But more on that later.) Slowly, what began as an organic movement turned into a legitimate, sustainable business. Eventually, we both left the businesses we started to step into YEC full-time and grew it into the thriving organization that it is today.

By 2012 YEC had become a huge resource for entrepreneurs and media alike. Today, YEC is composed of more than seventeen hundred entrepreneurs in North America forty years old and under, whose companies make more than $1 million annually in revenue. The group has led to thousands of meaningful business connections, and the business generates several million dollars in revenue annually. Our success with YEC even inspired the creation of other membership groups for professionals in different business sectors through partnerships with organizations like Forbes and Men’s Health. These communities sit alongside YEC now in our new umbrella company, The Community Company, which works with media enterprises, global brands, and celebrities to build professional organizations that help our partners create greater engagement and customer affinity.

And we owe it all to an introduction made by a third party who connected two guys living in two separate parts of the country who shared very similar ideas and ideals. Thanks to our mutual friend Dan, who had the foresight to connect two guys—two connectors who think and act like connectors!—we were able to create something amazing. We took the ball Dan tossed our way and ran with it. We used our methodology to build social capital and, eventually, saw great financial success.

Let’s be clear: none of this would have happened if not for a single connection from our dear friend Dan Schawbel, the Superconnector who saw an opportunity for two people with different strengths to create and make something magical happen.

“I had a gut feeling,” Dan later told us. “In my head I’m thinking, ‘The two personalities are very different, but they are in effect trying to do the same thing.’” His gut was right. If we hadn’t teamed up, YEC would never have made the transition from a small idea to a movement and then led to a successful business. That’s the power of a good connection—and the power of a Superconnector. Again, a whole lot of value can be created with just one single connection with the right context, purpose, and reasoning. If we didn’t trust Dan or Dan’s judgment, or if we had chosen not to listen to him, we might have never met. Or we might have met and not taken the relationship any further. But we both recognized that this was a connection worth diving into. As a result, we built a business that has changed both of our lives for the better.

But we weren’t the only ones whose lives changed. Dan’s access, reach, and clout increased exponentially as well. His cachet grew along with his opportunities: He increased his direct and indirect access to media outlets and other entrepreneurs in YEC who could help him in his professional endeavors. He benefited from YEC, just by association. That’s the kind of serendipitous good karma that more often than not comes back to a Superconnector, because of their goodwill and thoughtfulness in connecting others.