In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

Jesus what a nay-sayer. I wonder if in early 1999 he would have dismissed Google saying, "A website to search the Internet? Why? I can just go directly to what I want!". Sheesh.

I think you have to distinguish between nay-saying as a stylistic means and arguing with his point. I think there is a valid philosophical point to be made that young entrepreneurs are not daring enough. Aside from the fact that it's really, really hard not to settle for "easy" execution, society would probably indeed be better off if people dared to go for more daunting tasks. I guess you can say: If you want to glorify some people - like BW does -, select mostly those who try (and most certainly will fail in doing so) the truly groundbreaking stuff. Those are the ones that society needs to succeed. But it's all philosophical.

Thanks to the participatory nature of technology these days, its become fiendishly difficult to predict what's going to produce wealth[1].

It used to be easy, wealth was made by growing something and eating it or digging something up and banging it into a shape. It got a bit more subtle when people realized that dragging stuff places (where said stuff was likely eaten or banged into a shape) could create wealth too.

It got even harder when information became wealth. Mostly at first by letting people know the best places to drag stuff and the best shapes to bang stuff into.

Now we are at the place where the idea itself can attract wealth when it goes viral and millions of people suddenly contribute to it. Facebook, wikipedia, twitter etc. It might actually be a clue that these are hard to "monetize" yet are seismic forces in peoples' lives. Wealth and money might finally be starting to go their separate ways.

I think maybe the author might have a little bit of dig stuff up and bang it into a shape bias, but I understand how it might be difficult to spot the wealth creation potential in some of these "new fangled" ventures.

[1] Wealth in the "bettering all human kind" sense, not the "pile of government printed paper" sense.

i don't see those, because i long ago edited my hosts file to get rid of them. lines for your own hosts file:

  127.0.0.1       spa.snap.com
  127.0.0.1       shots.snap.com
  127.0.0.1       snap.com
  127.0.0.1       i.ixnp.com

Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on the way the competition does business

One of these people designs logos etc for medical practices, employs 5 people and has revenues of $225,000. By my calculations that is an average of $25/hour per person in revenue. That is not pushing the boundaries in revenue or ideas - that is just another person who has a small business. I'm not criticising that person in the slightest, that is great for them, but if they are making a list of top entrepreneurs under 25 then that is pretty sad.

As I think someone else pointed out this is probably more just a case of very poor journalism.