The millennials are taking over–VCJ news analysis

PE HUB
June 9, 2015

If you’ve checked your­self com­plain­ing recent­ly about all the young entre­pre­neurs, chances are good you’re prob­a­bly a baby boomer. At best, you’re a Gen Xer.

Mil­len­ni­als are tru­ly tak­ing over. They’re grow­ing in num­bers, out­pac­ing their old­er rel­a­tives and enter­ing the work­force in droves. And late­ly, more tech star­tups, whether they’re focused on mes­sag­ing, mobile mar­ket­places or fin­tech, are tar­get­ing the group, which includes those born from the ear­ly 1980s to 2000, rough­ly speaking.

“Mil­len­ni­als are a mobile-first gen­er­a­tion. They’re accus­tomed to access­ing infor­ma­tion on their phones and get­ting ser­vices dig­i­tal­ly,” said Paul Hol­land, gen­er­al part­ner of Foun­da­tion Cap­i­tal, an investor in text­book rental provider Chegg, free mes­sag­ing app Kik, the col­lege-focused social net­work Blend and the food deliv­ery ser­vice Spoonrocket.

…

Co-founder and CEO Kathryn Min­shew describes the job search site as LinkedIn for millennials.

“Exist­ing job search prod­ucts are not for us,” said the 29-year-old Min­shew. “Mil­len­ni­als are a high­ly visu­al gen­er­a­tion. And we care about com­pa­ny cul­ture. A lot of cur­rent job sites don’t under­stand that and will list end­less amounts of text. We start­ed the com­pa­ny because we want­ed a job site that resem­bles a new­er ecom­merce web­site rather than an old­er careers site.”

Although non-mil­len­ni­als use The Muse, the site’s aver­age user is 29, she said.

She said when her and her co-founders were rais­ing a seed round in 2013, they did not use the word “mil­len­ni­als” in their pitch. That was part­ly to avoid los­ing the inter­est of poten­tial VCs.

“Investors would say they don’t use the site. But once we explained it to them, they under­stood and doors opened,” she said.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it PE HUB.

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