In fact, if you’ve already started an internet business you’re on the leading edge. Ernst & Young LLP recently completed a survey that found that 78 percent of influential Americans believe entrepreneurship will be the defining trend of the 21st Century. The Age of the Entrepreneur is upon us and you’ve got a head start!

Thomas Petzinger, a Wall Street Journal columnist, believes, "Everyone will have to be an entrepreneur in the future." Makes you wonder who’s going to take your order at Wendy’s, doesn’t it? Particularly when, next century, there remains only one company, something like Exxon/Microsoft/AT&T.

Lighting the fire for this trend are three groups. Enterprising Baby Boomers to be sure, but the largest groups may be Generation X, clearly more technologically savvy, and the Millennium Generation, the children born after 1980. These are the kids who saw their parents come home with the horror stories of Dad or Mom working late because the company fired five people and he or she is picking up the slack. In their mind, working for a corporation is not very enticing.

The Ernst & Young LLP study also tried to shed light on the forces that have contributed to the rise of entrepreneurship. Not surprisingly, 98% of Influential Americans surveyed said technology contributed a great deal (76%) or somewhat (22%). Second on the list is economic conditions (e.g. low inflation and interest rates) with 88%. Social conditions, such as two-income families, came next at 85%. Filling out the forces contributing to the rise in entrepreneurship are the advent of a global economy (79%), government deregulation (68%) and the inability of large corporations to innovate (68%).

So if the looming millennium has you thinking, "Oh no, by the turn of the century I was going to be wealthier than Bill Gates, taken my spouse on a month-long Mediterranean cruise and retired to Bermuda!" take heart. While you may not make it by the end of 1999, you’ve got a head start on the next century.