Ever-Younger Entrepreneurs
Internet, low costs lead to early-in-life startups.
Boston Globe:
Zaid Farooqui cofounded Web design company Cyquester Technologies and hired an employee in India for $400 a month – when he was in the ninth grade.
Steven Bao sold a Facebook program to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and started the Facebook Developers Meetups in Boston this summer, while reading ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ for 10th grade honors English.
There have always been ambitious young entrepreneurs – Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard University to build Microsoft, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin left a PhD program at Stanford University to launch Google.
But thanks to cheap bandwidth, online advertising, broadband access, and the ability to spread ideas through blogs or social networks, even younger people with little funding and few connections have been starting Internet-related companies in recent years.
‘In the old days, the entrepreneurial avenues that were open to you could have been a paper route, mow the lawns in your neighborhood, or have a lemonade stand,’ said Lee Lorenzen, chief executive of Altura Ventures. Altura bought Bao’s application, which allows people to post virtual badges showing they have iPhones on their Facebook profiles, and had to add an extra line in the purchase documents so his parents could sign for their underage son.
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