Take Your Sadie to 1871 Day
- Jul 23, 2014
- 2 min read
By Jamie Damato Migdal, CEO and Pet Industry Entrepreneur
Last week I declared an unofficial “Take Your Child to the Tech Incubator” day at 1871. Although I didn’t get a lot of real work done, I felt great about being able to take Sadie with me, instead of having to make the all-too-common working mother’s choice of leaving her behind or staying home myself. As I watched her power through the halls of 1871 like she owned the place, I started pondering the future of my daughter in the workforce twenty years from now.
It is overstating the obvious to say that things are different now, but – things are different now. The days when you spent your life at the same company are long gone. Today, it’s not unusual to hear people speak of their working lives as being divided into acts: Act I, get a job out of college, hopefully in an industry where you can use your degree, and work 60-80 hours of week for comparatively little pay. Act II, find an industry that pays well enough and isn’t so awful that you can’t stand to work there for a quarter century while you buy your house, have your family, and get your kids off to college. Act III, take everything you’ve learned, count up your savings and assets, and leave the stable job to do what you really love.
But how will the arc of a person’s working life look when Sadie is an adult? I think “successful” will be defined very differently in twenty years, and will be a function of the value of your network and the quality of your life rather than the size of your house or the price tag on your car. I think far more people will be working in incubator-type environments, where cross-fertilization and collaboration will erase the boundaries between disciplines. I look forward to the day when you can walk into a place like 1871 and see just as many women as men. And in the meantime, the world’s tiniest entrepreneur will keep looking for her angel investor.
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Photo and video courtesy of Drew Migdal.
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