By Grace Lee, Logic Solutions, Inc.; Treasurer, MIT Enterprise Forum, Great Lakes Chapter

In his recent book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that besides intelligence and some common traits, extremely successful people’s families, birthplaces, and even their birth dates have a profound effect on their successes.

One of interesting commonality is the birth date of some of extremely successful technology companies’ executives: Eric Schmidt (Google): April 27, 1955, Bill Joy (Sun Microsystems): November 8, 1954, Scott McNealy (Sun Microsystems): November 13, 1954, Steve Jobs (Apple): February 24, 1955, Paul Allen (Microsoft): January 21, 1953. All of them were teenagers when the computer age started to take off.

So what does this mean to the rest of us, the struggling entrepreneurs or entrepreneur want-to-be’s? Since we were born either way before or after 1954 and 1955, did we miss the golden opportunity to be successful?

Malcolm Gladwel’sl argument only reinforces one of the most important elements of entrepreneurship: Chaos Creates Opportunity. If there is no disruption to the equilibrium, big companies will rule the business world and there is no opportunity for new comers: Sony, IBM, AT&T, and Sears will dominate the world. There will be no Google, no Apple, no eBay, and no Amazon.

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