Noah Kraft was a charismatic twenty-something when he set up Doppler Labs, a business with a mission to build a “computer for the ears”.
It was a commercial enterprise with a social purpose: to improve life for the hard of hearing. It reportedly raised $50m in venture capital funding for its flagship product, the HereOne — smart earbuds that were a kind of souped-up version of Apple’s AirPods.
Mr Kraft, and other high-profile millennial company founders, such as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Evan Spiegel at Snapchat and Alexis Ohanian at Reddit, appear to be proof of their generation’s ambition and start-up spirit. In fact, they are atypical. Millennials — people born between 1981 and 1996, as the Pew Research Center defines the generation — are actually not very entrepreneurial.