Fred Wilson once blogged about the term Net Native. He extended the definition of Internet only web services to Internet only people.  It stuck with me because I truly identified with it.  Throughout the years at Citi, legacy resources and managers fought my drive to turn to the Internet for all business communication (it’s still happening).  My initial and final reaction was incredulity that people where so obtuse and incapable of evolution to not see efficiency and profitability in the Internet. I felt this way until I left the company at the beginning of the year.  If you look at the relative number of staff that are decked against Internet only job descriptions it’s still lopsided to the point that Internet is still defined as an “alternate channel”.  Nice.
So now that we’re staffing up at MMV, we’re up to 18 depending on how you count, I find myself coming back to this historical blog entry. MMV is a net native service for sure and we’re looking for Net Natives to be on the team.  However, I’m finding that my early bias (and lack of my own perspective) veered towards an age cutoff for true Net Natives.  Now the immersion factor is more apparent and more impactful than being born with a silver broadband card.

Our CEO is a good example of Gen X and their need for a Net life as their families, business contacts and friends spread out.  Another phenomenon that I’m seeing more and more of is the Gen Y (my generation according to Straus and Howe, but sometimes I’m defined as the end of Gen X) 30 year old who doesn’t have a Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Blog life.  In fact I keep running into people like this who pay homage to the “Generation pay their bills with…CHECKS, ENVELOPES and STAMPS!  What the fuck man?

So in hiring into our company, we have to quickly weed the “Alternate Channel” managers who are going to know all the right company names, “DoubleClick, Google, Yahoo, Altavista…oh, oops I meant Twitter!”.  We need to make sure these guys are not going around SOMA with their MMV fleeces on, trying to pay with checks.