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

Well, I would have preferred to upmod and comment on a better-written post that expressed that sentiment, but this works.

I mean, I agree with some of his specific critiques and I certainly agree with the feeling -- that new startups should focus more on things that create wealth, and not just the short-term "people will invest in this" kind that can vanish overnight. (Let's leave aside, for the moment, that this was in reaction to an article about the "Best" Entrepreneurs, not the companies with the brightest futures).

But, obviously, it takes a lot of foresight and a deep knowledge of the company in question to know whether or not it's doing that.

You mentioned Google. I'd use his own example, to illustrate A) the grandpa factor, and B) the foresight problem.

He uses the example of Bill Gates. "At 20, Bill Gates had started his own company and written ... A BASIC INTERPRETER."

Grandpa factor: lots of us write interpreters; some of us even mess around with interpreters written in asm on old-timey hardware; it wasn't even rare at the time. There were TONS of nerds who wrote and write interpreters, and I'd be very surprised if a majority of the companies he mentions didn't have someone on staff who'd climbed that particular molehill. So, Grandpa Factor -- the things that a lot of these startups are doing are probably as impressive as anything Gates started out doing. And I don't think even Gates would argue that it was easier to set your sights on "BASIC Interpreter" than "carbon nanotubes in my dorm room."

Second, foresight. Given that all startups look like crap in their early stage (and we're now shining the light of journalism into startups at TREMENDOUSLY early stages, 'just another hobbyist implementing a standard basic interpreter'), etc, how do you know which crap will turn out to be valuable?

Anyone could probably have told, from his education and personality, that Gates was an ambitious, intelligent young man. Okay. That's a long way from "The umpteenth young gun writing an interpreter for frikkin BASIC is going to take over the world of personal computing."

This article is noise. You need to know why Twitter is valuable before you could honestly critique Tumblr or any number of these other social/real-time media services. You need to know just how bad Gates, Google et al all seemed at first before you can have credibility when you trash a wide swath of early-stage companies as a total waste of time.

( I have reservations that are similar in nature to his own, actually -- but I know enough not to confidently assert that, say, Tumblr will leave no trace on the tech landscape. And, of course, this is a Best Young Entrepreneurs article, not at all a Best Companies Started By Young Entrepreneurs -- you can argue that there shouldn't be a difference, but then you're arguing that Business Week should have better taste, and who cares?)

Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account all entrepreneurs across America. Untrue.

May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a bunch of businesses is very easy--even if I agree with many of your assessments about individual ones.

This same sort of linguistic game was done to the word "professional", by encouraging customers to conflate the word with "skilled", etc. (Don't remodel your own house, have a "pro" do it!") Except, in this case, it's not being done to market a trade but rather to define an elite class.

The most amusing part of this, to me, is that there just wasn't enough nuance already built into a French word. That might be a first.

Yep, those are all grounds for interesting ideas that one could discuss over coffee for a good while. The entrepreneurs identified in the article that is being criticized however seem to have very bland businesses (coffee intern placement doesn't really capture the imagination).

Actually internships are quite eye-opening stuff when done at the right place. So i'd say the internship website was a brilliant idea.