On a cold weekday afternoon last January, 34-year-old Brian Benavidez plopped down with his girlfriend on a big white shabby-chic sofa in his loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to watch a documentary about hot dogs. Benavidez, an M.B.A. and former investment banker, had been out of work since October, when he was laid off from his six-figure job at Bolt, a Manhattan Internet company.
After a couple months of reading and sleeping until noon, he had begun to interview for jobs, but things weren't looking so good. Benavidez described himself as "just professionally depressed."
But something about that hot dog documentary caught his attention.
"I noticed that everybody who was being interviewed was happy," Benavidez said. "The people who worked behind the counters, the owners, the customers, they were all smiling. I told my girlfriend, `I want to make people that happy.'"
A few hours later, Benavidez said, he had an epiphany: "I'll do hot dogs."
Selling hot dogs and cheese fries was hardly the career Benavidez imagined for himself when he earned his degree from Columbia Business School in 1996, in the early days of the Internet boom.
Back then, everyone had a business plan in his knapsack and venture capital flowed like Evian on a corporate charge card. But these are times of adjusted -- if not diminished -- expectations, especially for those young ambitious professionals who were swept up in the technology bubble of the late 1990s only to be unceremoniously disgorged a few years later.
A few like Benavidez are refusing to let go of the entrepreneurial spirit and the dream of self-made riches that fueled start-up mania.
Instead of spending billions to build a global brand, these recalibrated entrepreneurs are spending a few thousand dollars to make it big, or at least medium, in their own neighborhoods. They are opening concession stands, spas and bakeries, many with a post-millennial twist. Benavidez, for example, spent weeks searching for the perfect hot dog before settling on a hormone-free beef frank from grass-fed cattle on a California ranch.
If the Internet economy was built on vapor, these new ventures are all too real. "I buy eggs, flour and cheese and turn it into things people like and will pay more for than I did," said Assaf Tarnopolsky, 31, a Wharton School of Business graduate who is now the proud owner of two crepe stands in San Francisco, under the self-bestowed title of the West Coast Crepe King. Tarnopolsky lost his US$125,000-a-year job last September when his employer went bankrupt, so he turned to an earlier love.
He had grown up eating crepes in Geneva, and as a hobby slopped batter on a hot iron at a San Francisco farmer's market on weekends. After a couple of "miserable" interviews, he said, "I decided, if it works on Saturday and Sunday, why not Monday through Friday?"
The lifestyle change has not been easy. "Despite what people think," he said, "it's more stressful and more work than my corporate job." Tarnopolsky frequently wakes up at night worrying about crepes, and he and his wife now live with "a Depression-era mentality."
"We're pinching pennies, cooking at home and not going to weddings we'd love to go to because they're too expensive."
Ari Ginsberg, director of the entrepreneurship program at New York University's Stern School of Business, says that's what it takes. Ginsberg said that in every generation of professionals there are some who seek the stability of corporate jobs and others who are driven to go it alone.
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