If you want to know where the money's at in 2013, you only need to take a look at the names making the biggest waves in the world of entrepreneurship. So, let's go down the list, shall we?
David Karp sold Tumblr for $1 billion to Yahoo! in June. Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed a resurgent summer with Facebook and Instagram.
Shutterstock CEO Jon Oringer became New York City's first tech billionaire a few months ago before YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen launched a new video-sharing website, MixBit in August.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is prepping for the social network's IPO at a valuation upwards of $10 billion, while his other business, mobile payment company Square, rolled into its new San Francisco headquarters this fall after doubling its amount of employees in a year.
As for the young(er) guns -- well, how much time do you have?
From 22-year-old Lucas Duplan, the Stanford dropout who'd drawn $25 million of venture capital over the summer and recently welcomed a former Netflix executive on board for his startup, Clinkle, to the three Harvard sophomores who aim to make their mark by revolutionizing online advertising with their app, Side, there is a bevy of tech-star hopefuls looking to cash in on what has very much become the en vogue industry of the decade.
But whether they are well established millionaires or promising prospects, whether they are getting ready for their companies to hit the stock market or getting ready to hit the books, all of the above mentioned people have one thing in common: they all have a background in computer programming.
Search for any article, any biographical account of a recently successful entrepreneur, and you'll probably notice a common denominator: hours upon hours spent behind computer screens, writing code, looking to perfect the products that would go on to make them millions.
The reason for this is simple. The majority of this generation's most fascinating companies are startups like Snapchat or WhatsApp, enterprises that are spawned from cool ideas and young minds with the vision and resources to effect change.
And, in this day and age, there is no greater resource than the skill of coding. The best thing about it? It's not as hard as people make it out to be.
"A lot of the coding that people do is actually fairly simple," said Facebook's Makinde Adeagbo in this Code.ord video. "It's more about the process of breaking down problems than coming up with complicated algorithms as people traditionally think about it."
Coding is a skill that is at the heart of many of America's most lucrative jobs today. Sure, the founders who make millions off the projects, apps and companies they started all on their own are, obviously, few in number when considering the grand scheme of things. But these same founders require more talent to substantiate their teams in order to refine the website, improve design and perfect the final products.
It's safe to say that being code savvy would be advantageous for any member of Generation-Y, especially those who contribute to the depressing statistics of employment rates amongst the age group. If the efforts of the nation's biggest tech companies are anything to judge by, it would appear that not enough young people have set out to cash in on what has rapidly become a booming industry.
Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, normally fierce competitors, all joined together to throw their support behind the Hour of Code initiative, directed by Code.org, which aims to teach as many K-12 students the art of coding to prepare equip them with a skill thats prominence is only likely to increase.
“This is the first time that all these companies and founders have joined forces together,” Code.org founder Hadi Partovi told the New York Times. “Although they may compete in their day-to-day business, what’s clear to every technologist in America is we need to do a better job educating our youth for the demands of the 21st century.”
But while tech giants turn their attention to the next generation of potential revolutionaries, it should be mentioned that all is not lost for the generation that is just a step above, especially with sites out there, like CodeAcademy, that make it easy to learn different languages of code.
So, in an era during which there's success to be reached from innovating, 20-somethings have every reason to learn the money skill of the decade: coding.
