In 2024, Forbes reported that video games are developing future leaders.
The article cited countless hours spent in virtual worlds as ‘shaping a new generation of leaders who navigate complex business challenges with the same strategic precision they once used to conquer digital realms’ – a generational change revolutionising how businesses approach decision-making.
With these thoughts in mind is it likely that today’s entrepreneurs are also deploying skills honed through gaming and social media to create a new wave of successful businesses?
Historically, a typical entrepreneur might have started their journey in a garage, or even a bedroom. British entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair famously began by designing simple radio circuits and selling them through mail order. He founded Sinclair Radionics at the age of 21. At its zenith, the business reached $20m dollars globally in annual sales. In 1976 America, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne built their first computer. In 2025, the worldwide turnover of Apple was $416 billion.
Historically, a typical entrepreneur might have started their journey in a garage, or even a bedroom. British entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair famously began by designing simple radio circuits and selling them through mail order. He founded Sinclair Radionics at the age of 21. At its zenith, the business reached $20m dollars globally in annual sales. In 1976 America, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne built their first computer. In 2025, the worldwide turnover of Apple was $416 billion.
A quiet education?
While parents might have been telling their youngsters not to waste time with video games and social media, those same juveniles were being taught lessons that once took years of real-world failure to learn.
Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) strategy games often reward management of resources, risk assessment, and evaluating opponents. These are skills that directly align with competitive markets. Games with levels normalise the notion of iterative improvement: winning comes from compounding small gains over time.
Guild and clan structures, features of many massive multiplayer games, create informal leadership hothouses. Many strangers coordinated across time zones with a shared objective can look very similar to managing a distributed startup team. Arguably many of today’s entrepreneurs may have learned how to delegate, motivate, and resolve conflict online.
Gaming has also changed the type of organisations today’s entrepreneurs might build. Gaming and social media experience has arguably led to entrepreneurship in digital goods, virtual currencies, and community-driven products. Even outside near-gaming industries, founders may instinctively think in terms of feedback loops, achievement models, streaks, and using game design mechanics to make their products or services ‘stickier’. Many of the challenger banks are a perfect example, such as Monzo and Revolut.
Learning through socials?
Gaming may have influenced the way modern entrepreneurs think, but social media may be influencing the way they build their companies from the outset. Traditionally, an entrepreneur might make the product first, test the idea, gain feedback and pre-sell concepts to raise finance. By contrast many of today’s entrepreneurs build publicly: narrating their journey across platforms such as X or TikTok as a legitimate market strategy.
Social media has also compressed the journey between concept and validation: founders once needed months and formal focus groups to obtain feedback; today a posted prototype, a web page, or a pitch can gain responses within hours. This has effectively added pace and made the process more iterative. However, validation on social media is not a guarantee of paying customers, and it could be argued that viral approval can sometimes come at the cost of the more difficult, necessary fundamentals of building and scaling a company.
Perhaps most importantly, social media can turn a founder into a product in their own right. Personal branding is no longer an option for many young entrepreneurs. Investors, customers, and even talent increasingly discover companies through a founder’s online presence rather than traditional marketing.
This demands skills such as storytelling, online profile, and community management, ironically talents many entrepreneurs will have acquired through their social media interactions. In today’s world they are as vital as spreadsheets and pitch presentations.
A double-edged sword?
The dopamine-fueled components that make gaming and social media compelling can also distort entrepreneurial judgement. Chasing ‘likes’, followers, or short-term interactions instead of business fundamentals can be hugely damaging to growing a business. The same instant-response features that enable founders to iterate rapidly can also encourage impatience with the slower, often unglamourous elements of business development, such as operations, product economics, and customer retention. These are not things that go viral.
Many of today’s successful entrepreneurs are likely to have realised that gaming and social media fluency are hugely valuable but no substitutes for expertise and financial discipline. Success comes from blending the benefits of gaming and social media with rigorous execution. Online engagement can be a poor substitute for genuine product and market cohesion.
An informal apprenticeship?
Arguably, gaming and social media could be described as the informal apprenticeships of a new entrepreneurial generation, affecting how founders develop strategies, build products, and leverage personal branding. Barriers to starting a company are lower, and rapid-response feedback has enabled entirely new business models to be built around digital communities. Deployed well, these can translate into real competitive advantage. However, used poorly, they can become a distraction. As with all learning models the real art lies in taking the best and adding real-world experience to build better.
