On Tuesday, I had lunch with three former colleagues. One is a very close friend, who is also very close in age to me. (I'm four weeks younger.) The senior member of our lunch bunch is five years older, a member of The Silent Generation, who missed out on Boomer-dom by a couple of years. The youngster in the group is 61, ten years my junior - almost to the day, just off by one.
Our conversation was wide ranging, a lot of catching up to do, a lot of looking at pictures of cute grandkids. (Okay. I'll admit it: I'm a bit jealous. A major downside of not having had kids is no cute grandkids to show off.) For some reason, I thought of introducing non-fungible tokens into the convo mix, but before I could say NFT, my junior-most lunchmate beat me to the punch.
He's all over it, brimming with interest and enthusiasm for the 100% digital and 100% leisure time (thanks to AI and robotics) that his kids and grandkids will inhabit. And he's all up on NFT's.
He's also a midlife serial entrepreneur, with one reasonably good-size success under his belt and a new venture in the making. Not to mention, he's a visionary, creatively thinking about how different technologies are going to take hold.
Visionary? Me? Ahhhhh, not so much. I can't tell you how many business plans I helped write over the course of my career - including, if I remember correctly, a couple for this fellow - and I was ALWAYS the one assigned to write the risk assessment. The downside has ALWAYS been more obvious to me than the upside, which I suppose explains an awful lot.
Anyway, his obvious enthusiasm met with a brim-full measure of harrumphing from me (in which I was lightly abetted by the other two alter kockers) about what a crazy world we live in. A world in which a couple of guys create a goofball cryptocurrency (dogecoin) as a lark and turn a bunch of investors into millionaires. A world in which an NFT of the first tweet set by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey - just setting up my twttr - sold for nearly $3 million. And, of course, companies with operations that continuously lose hundreds of millions but have the right vibe and use the right technology to maybe turn some unicorn-seeking investors into get-rich-quick- billionaires.
Anyway, when I got back from lunch, I saw an article on two 30-something friends who are building a business - like dogecoin, it started out as a jokey thing; unlike dogecoin, they haven't (yet) created millions of dollars worth of wealth for anyone - based on an Instagram account created called Thirty AF.
Chloe Jankowitz and Peter West are Emerson College grads who started Thirty AF as a way to stay connected to each other and fellow Emersonians.
What started as a collection of self-deprecating memes and jokes aimed at millennials in their 30s, as well as regular descents into 1990s-early 2000s nostalgia, has become a full-blown business venture for the two college friends. Now, they’re mapping out their next moves, expanding the “AF” name into other niche markets on Instagram while taking their brand far beyond the social media platform. (Source: Boston Globe)They started off with a small-ish number of followers, but it started rolling and by early 2020, they had about 200,000 followers.
But over the next year, with people desperate for community and light-hearted diversion, their fanbase surged to 1 million with no signs of slowing down.
“I think quarantine is what did it. Everyone was kind of looking for a way to feel or stay connected, and I feel like that’s kind of what led us to grow so quickly,” Jankowitz said. “Everyone was at home, looking for something to do.”
Including one superstar, perhaps.
“Demi Lovato following,” West added. “That was a game-changer.”
Demi Lovato, huh? All I can say is that Nancy Sinatra follows me on Twitter, which I suppose has helped run my follower list up to nearly 600. (That and some comments in which I made snide remarks about Bill Barr and Chuck Grassley.)
Thirty AF shares memes etc. "mostly playing into self-deprecating millennial humor about being broke, not being able to afford a house, partying while others were getting engaged, and not having children," has plenty of content that plays to nostalgia for childhood, and even "opened an online store that tapped into nostalgic themes (Koozies featuring a picture of Jonathan Taylor Thomas, the heartthrob from the 90s hit show “Home Improvement,” and a “nostalgia box” filled with goodies popular in the 90s and early 2000s.)"
I looked through some of the material on Thirty AF , and while much of the cultural/childhood memory content is lost on me - I mean, I know who Demi Lovato and Justin Timberlake are; it's just that they hold no meaning to me - what they (Chloe and Peter, not Demi and Justin) have to say is fresh and funny, even to this old geezer. And some of it's just plain sad: crazy housing costs do mean that plenty of these folks won't be able to find a house they can afford unless they're willing to re-lo to Detroit. Sigh.
Plus they're providing a real value: community. They're not influencers. They're not gamble/vestors hoping to get chumps to bid up the price of bitcoin. They're not a thin-air company in which their expenses far outstrip any revenue they ever hope to achieve. They're not pushing nonsense NFTs. Maybe they are looking to turn into a unicorn, have someone value them at a couple of billion, cash out and call it a career. But so far, so good. A fun, organically grown site that has no cost of entry to those who share in it. Yes, they've monetized it enough that it may be turning into a job-job. But it still seems like they're having fun without turning into soulless greed-heads.
So good for Chloe and Peter.
Frankly, I'm jealous.
Sure, the world is crappy and scary, but I still wouldn't mind having 35 years back. Especially knowing what I know now.
And one of the things I know now is that it seldom hurts to go for it.
So maybe I should go for Seventy AF?
I know, I know. Facebook probably has the corner on the 70's brigade reminiscing about Clarabelle and his seltzer bottle, spending 50 cents on gas, where they were when JFK got shot, and dancing to Wooly Bully while wearing madras. And bitching about arthritic knees.
But what about Twitter? What about Insta?
Would Seventy AF find a welcome there?
Knowing myself, I probably won't go for it, but I'm sure someone will.
After all, there's already a couple of Seventy AF cake toppers available on Amazon.
The world is sure amazing AF, isn't it?
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