This is Technology for the Millennial | CEO of Levo, Caroline Ghosn

Hey guys, it's such a pleasure to be here. My name's Caroline. Hi. Hi, thank you. I have a very brutally honest style, so I'm here to answer any questions that you have. My goal is to walk out of here having given you tactical things that you can do to really start your first business or improve the first business that you're in the process of starting. So you can interrupt me at any time, raise your hand, and be like, hey, what about this? I heard this. Is this difficult? And I'm gonna give you a straight answer. You already know that I'm going to, 'cause we've had dinner and done this before. So I'm really thrilled to be here. Really believe so, so, so deeply in the power of sharing learning and going up one learning curve, which is the entire reason that Levo exists. Basically, I'm gonna do a quick scan around the room and make an assumption that we're all millennials. Yeah, that sounds fair. OK. So we're really special. And I know this doesn't help our reputation as an entitled and lazy generation to come up here on a stage and say, oh, we're so special and here's why. But we truly are. So millennials are the first digital native generation ever. Everybody before us was a digital convert and learned how to use technology at different stages of their lives. We have never really known what it's like to not have the internet. And we're the first generation in civilization that has that benefit. And that means something very, very powerful in terms of our expectations and also the possibilities that we as entrepreneurs can actually bring into fruition and bring into real life. So specifically, let's think about this a little bit, because we live it, so we might not, like, realize how much it affects us. How many of you expect that through the internet you can find whatever you want whenever you want? That's a huge shift. We're the first generation to believe that we can access anything Whenever we want. How fast do you expect that to happen? Instantly. We also are very impatient relative to other generations, because long lost are the days of, I'm going to go find out in the encyclopedia what the answer to that is. Yesterday I was in the process of, you know, I'm moving into my apartment in San Francisco, and I unpacked this box of encyclopedias. And my friend looked at me and went, why do you have that? And I said, oh, it's beautiful to look at. I'm going to put it on my shelf decoratively. And he goes, you realize that, like, 30 years ago, people used these as their source of information, and they got updated once a year? And then if you were lucky and you were cool enough, you would buy, like, the new edition, and you would put it on your bookshelf, and that's how you would update your knowledge of whatever was happening in the world. I mean, think about that. So we expect to be able to touch anything we want, right, information-wise, and do it instantly. Third question I have for you is around what I like to call democracy. So who can you talk to on the internet? Anyone. Yeah. So you could tweet at President Obama. He might not answer you, but the point is you could do it. And you feel like there's some sort of channel that's been opened because you have that ability. So enter millennials in the workforce, because we're now entering the workforce for the first time. We believe in speed. We believe in instant access to information. And we believe that we can talk to whoever we want whenever we want. So you start to see why that's going to be a little bit of a problem when we enter the workforce and we enter organizations, for those of us who do enter organizations, that have opacity, that still run at the same speed as they've always run, and where people tell us things like, why don't you wait your turn and just put your head down, do your work, and in 8 to 9 months we'll give you a performance review. Buh-bye. Doesn't work. So what we're seeing is that for the first time in history, The average amount of time that people under the age of 34 are expected to stay in their job is 1.5 years. That's it. 1.5 years. So just by comparison, so we'll talk a little bit about why we're so special. We millennials, there are 86 million of us in this country alone. We stay 1.5 years at employers. Let's compare us to Gen X. Gen X, 48 million Gen Xers. So we're a lot bigger than them overall. And they used to stay, and they currently stay at employers an average of 5 years. So just from a mental switch standpoint, we're so much less loyal than this group of people who was just in the workforce before us. Now let's go to baby boomers. Everybody loves baby boomers. Baby boomers, they save us, save America, right? There's 76 million baby boomers in the United States. And the expectation for a baby boomer in the workforce is about 7 years per job. 7. 5. 1.5, and we're upset about it when we don't get access to instant information. We want to be in purpose-driven organizations. We have all these other demands about aligning our purpose, our passions, and our impact right away. This is the storm in which we live, and it's a storm that's both generational and is about technology. And so there's a really strong generational lens on what's going on today in the world. So I want to put a pin in that and go on to gender. There's a second piece that's really interesting about gender. For the first time in history, men and women are entering the workforce at the same rate. First time in history. So not only is our generation the first digital natives, we're also the first fully integrated generation at the beginning of the workforce. Don't get me started on what happens 7 years down the line. At the beginning of the workforce, it's equal. And we see that men and women graduate at about the same rate. If anything, women are graduating slightly more than men. But we'll just— we'll leave it at men and women graduate at the same rate. And we enter the workforce, and we expect for the majority of us to be able to find employment. Not only are there 86 million of us, but the majority of us are entering the workforce, as opposed to the 48 million that only had about 65 to 70% of the people in that group entering the workforce, as compared to baby boomers where it was closer to 50. So there's a real change going on, and it's not only generational, but it's gender-related. We're not seeing a lot of progress on the gender front. Yesterday was National Equal Pay Day. We actually— it's later than it was last year, which means that the wage gap is bigger than it was last year. So we're moving in the wrong direction. And that matters for everybody because the chances of you, whether you're male or female, being in a dual-income household are much higher. So, ladies, for those of you who are going to be earning 3/4 of what the next— the person next to you is going to earn for the same amount of work, that doesn't feel so great. But gentlemen, for those of you who will have a partner who is earning 3/4 of what she could be earning in the workforce, that's not so great for your family either, because that's missed income. And children who are, you know, coming from either single-family households or dual-income households are missing out on educational opportunities. and standards of living as a result. The point of me sharing all this data is not that I love facts, which I do. The point of me sharing all this data is to paint a picture for the context that we live in and why it's so important that we use technology to solve these problems. So I am fundamentally a technology optimist. I believe that we can use technology to solve these problems. Now I'll pause there because usually people violently disagree with me when I say that. However, I feel like I'm in a context of like minds. So maybe you guys are more likely than the average population to agree that that's a possibility. But what I mean is that if we're entering a world in which we as a generation aren't set up for success because the kinds of organizations that we're coming into don't believe that the way that we are wired is the way that they should work, and for those of us who are women inside of the generation, that we have a duplicated effect because of some of the dynamics that exist, then we need to use technology to solve both of these problems. So the good news is that professional networks exist. How many of you use LinkedIn every day? That's pretty high, actually. Great. So LinkedIn only has about 10% penetration of people under the age of 35. The average age is 45. It's mostly male. It's mostly international. That's great. They're doing their thing over here with Gen Xers and with Baby Boomers. What we found in our research is that people under the age of 35, technology natives, we aren't really using anything to navigate our careers. And what I mean by navigate is twofold. A, hunt. So if you do want a job, then you need to find it. But hopefully that's not more than every year and a half. So B, day in and day out, learn. How you can be better at your job, who you can meet, peers or mentors who can help you improve along that trajectory, and also how you even decide which direction is right for you. And so the goal of Levo is to use technology to help each and every person navigate their career step by step on a daily basis, not just when they're looking for jobs, but once they have a job, how can they be better at it, how can they find peers or mentors, how can they find resources to be more successful. And in doing that with technology, then we solve the problem of this whole generation of people who are otherwise going to have a real, real challenge earning our keep over the course of the next 10 years. So that's what we do at a high level. Thank you.