Meet London's young creatives defining generation #sidehustle

The trudge to work with a coffee in hand, logging off your office computer at 6pm, sitting on the Tube at rush hour, dreaming about those things you really wanted to do? Really? Still? Welcome to 2018. Welcome to the new economy. It’s moving fast, it’s open to all, and there’s just one thing you have to do: hustle.

This is the age of the start-up, the sideline business and projects. Whole workflows run from your smartphone. It is also the beginning of a new way of working that even big businesses realise they’ve got to be part of.

“The whole set of values of this generation is changing,” says Pip Jamieson, founder of The Dots, a platform for creative and culture employers to find the talent they need among the skilled freelance community. “Some 44 per cent of 25-to 35-year-olds in the US have a portfolio career. They might have regular jobs for three days and then run their own start-up or blog on the other two.

“Gone are the days of your parents’ when you went to work just to get paid. Life is short, younger people have realised, and you should do what you need to be happy.”

If you’ve watched The Social Network, on Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook in his bedroom, or any episode of The Apprentice, you get the idea. Start small, think big. That’s the stuff business myths are made of. But though it’s an old urge, it’s the digital space that has got the micro-entrepreneur juices going. Kickstarter will help fund ideas for the latest wearables, while you can create a brand on Instagram with dedication and a smartphone camera, run podcasts or magazines from your bedroom. Know coding, or at least the coding gang, and you’ve made a digital service app. The entry level is low, the rewards for doing what you love can be very high. No wonder it is so addictive.

Chris Guillebeau, author of Side Hustle and the New York Times bestseller The $100 Startup, says founding a business, even if just a small and low-paying sideline to your main job, is worth it.

“It’s incredibly empowering to wake up and see a PayPal notification from a stranger who’s sent you money while you were sleeping. Once you experience this, it’s hard to go back.”

Hustling is a word from the street. In the US it was a term for prostitution and it has been much used in rap culture. Now it has become a badge of honour for those who make it through hard graft. It requires a mindset that’s not usual to the office-trained worker: that of having your own idea and pushing it through.

“It’s now nearly a mainstream expectation to earn money from more than one source,” says Guillebeau. “When I started doing this 20 years ago, I didn’t know a lot of other people who were working the way I was. Now you can walk into any coffee shop anywhere and see people working on their laptops, managing an online store, hosting a coaching session or listing items for sale somewhere.”

Kathryn Parsons, the founder of Decoded, which trains executives and beginners alike in coding, AI and tech, says not every dream business has a plan and backing. “Decoded started with a credit card, borrowing someone’s house and pretending it was our office, me doing three different roles in disguise, and laptops we bought from an Apple store and had to take back every day (sorry, Apple!).”

But there has also been a sea change in how we think of such upstart startups. Bindi Karia, a former vice-president in London for Silicon Valley Bank, is now a super-connector between those early businesses, corporates, government and investors. “The kind of stuff I’m hustling for today wouldn’t have happened a decade ago,” she says. Europe “used to be more humble and risk-averse” but we’re finally “learning from America” about how to follow the dream and cuts deals.

You could put this new culture of the mobile entrepreneur down to the arrival of the iPhone, the laptop and the shared workspaces which have mushroomed through London. Or you could see the past 100 years of office culture as an aberration.

Before the age of railroad, most business was conducted by independent traders in coffee houses or in local markets. With the railroads of the 19th century came big companies and the need for offices to manage the administration and standardise practices. Corporations threw up skyscrapers as monuments to their ambition, theorists started designing workflow systems for the paper-pushers and we hunkered down in our masses in our desks, plugging away at the 9-5.

The laptop has been the liberation from this work life and, as the new hustle culture grows, it gets easier: when you’ve got a project that needs to grow you hire your own specialist hustlers — designers, connectors, techies — to pick up gigs as required, and if there are physical orders get the likes of Amazon to fulfil them.

We aren't all marching out of offices yet but even employers are beginning to recognise that urge to be entrepreneurial is something they need to incorporate into themselves.

In her business, Parsons is proud that her colleagues have their own hustles going on. “Dan Zell has a side business: the London Sock Exchange. Barry Whyte has one of the UK’s first virtual reality cinemas (Veero). It’s about the cross-pollination of ideas.”

And Karia notes that change is underway in big business structures too. “Some corporates are realising they need to do this to keep good employees so they’re creating roles that allow for some hustle — under the regulated corporate umbrella, of course — but employees are getting more freedom than ever before.”

It is an experiment that Google famously tried with its 20 per cent rule, whereby for a day a week or four days month employees were allowed the freedom to work on their own projects. It was designed for innovation — indeed it led to the introduction of Gmail — but also kept top-down management from stifling growth.

There is a darker side to the growth in hustle, though. It is also a means of survival in a world where the very thing that has freed you — technology — has also been a disruptive force in many workplaces.

“When you have a side hustle you are constantly learning and adopting new skills,” says Jamieson. “In the age of automation, one of the key ones is knowing how to adapt as you don’t know if your job is going to be made redundant next year.”

Guillebeau also sees the weakness of the current system driving the push to run your own business. “There’s widespread dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the traditional belief that a corporation is going to look after us, coupled with the fact that it’s never been easier or lower-risk to make money in different ways.”

Not to mention the flat wages and zero hours contracts. Trade that off against no commute, control of your own schedule and choice of where to work and it doesn’t seem so bad, even if the income doesn’t flow as readily at the lattes at first.

Or as rapper Mos Def put the reasoning succinctly: “My hustle is trying to figure out the best ways to do what I like without having to do much else.” He probably wasn’t thinking of the coffee shop entrepreneur at the time.