The Startup Kids

The growth of the Internet has

changed small startups to some

of the most influential

companies in the world.

Behind these companies are more

often than not young visionary

entrepreneurs who grew up with

the Internet and now seem best

positioned to direct the future

of the web.

Who are these new entrepreneurs

and what drives them?

A really great founder seems to

be building a groundswell even

if there is nothing there, and

so he in effect is a magician.

He creates something from

nothing.

You are always kind of just on

the edge of your comfort zone

and everything you are doing is

basically something you are just

barely qualified for or not

qualified for, it is like

jumping off a cliff and having

to build your own parachute

I think an entrepreneur, that is

A difficult one, how do you

define an entrepreneur. I think

an entrepreneur is a person who

dares to have a dream that not

that many people have and even

more importantly dares to chase

it with their money where their

mouth is and their time and

their career and dares to take

the risk to going out there to

realize that vision.

Entrepreneurs are some of the

craziest people you ever meet,

they are people who have a dream

or an idea, something that keeps

them awake at night and they get

the opportunity to hopefully

solve that problem or do

something about it.

So the best entrepreneurs are

often either solving their own

problems or solving some huge

things and they can really

Entrepreneurship at the moment

is kind of like the new smoking,

it's cool to be creative and it

is cool to be making something

and I just love that energy.

Over the last couple of years

the cost of starting

a web-based startup has

decreased dramatically.

I think over the last couple

Of years it has changed

dramatically. If you think back

to the turn of the century,

two thousand, what you had

was very large companies often

creating websites like Yahoo,

AOL, these were much bigger

companies creating new kind of

products on the internet.

With the crash those went away

but the Internet didn't go away

and what actually happens was

that new initiative, young

innovators came along looked

at the web and said we can do

Ten years ago if you wanted to

start-up a company you got to

pay a lawyer to tell you weather

you should do a "C" Corp or

a "LLC". Bam, that is a Google

search, done, free, in like five

minutes. You know by that time

you would not even gone past the

lawyer secretary ten years ago.

It is really interesting to see

What entrepreneurs will look

like ten years from now. Before

they were managers, maybe little

engineering but now they are

young tech people and hackers

Anybody now with a laptop

and a Wi-Fi connection

can build anything

Today a lot of people will be

able to start companies who

never could have before. This

applies specially to younger

people. They are willing to put

in the long, unpaid hours

and have nothing to loose.

As you get older you get certain

ways and certain patterns and

you recognize them and behave in

certain way but I think that the

young entrepreneurs see things

differently in a way that is often

times refreshing and therefore

groundbreaking.

One of the great benefits of

starting young in business is

that you have less to lose than

you know, once you have four

kids and something where you

have to re-mortgage your house

in order to finance your

company, that is a bigger risk

to take then if you come

straight out of university and

all you kind of have to choose

between is either you take up

a job or you start a crazy

company to do crazy thing

I have met kids out here who are

still teenager and starting

companies and all the way down

to sixteen years old, which is

pretty crazy when you think

about it.

Younger people have been

affected by less and they are

often times more idealistic and

they have bigger dreams and

bigger vision because they do

not know, necessary,

It doesn't really matter to me,

I could be fifty for all I care

because removing the age

element is really what I think,

what makes the Silicon Valley

area so fascinating. That I know

so many people that could be

really young or really old,

they still take you seriously,

they will still listen to you.

And that is why there is culture

of listening that is so

conducive to entrepreneurship

which is why this area is so

valuable to people

Brian Wong grew up in Vancouver

Canada. At 19 he had raised

4,3 million dollars in funding

for his company, Kiip, a reward

network where you play games on

your phone and get real rewards

through Kiip's network.

My parents at one point thought

I was addicted to my computer

and wanted to take it away

from me and I'm glad that

they ended up not doing that but

I spent, like, eight to ten

hours a day on my computer this

was at a point when I was very

addicted to Counter Strike

Source, which is a first person

shooter game which was extremely

popular when I was young and

still very much is and I spent

hours and hours playing that

game to maintain my top of

server status and I was at the

top of like three servers and

it takes a lot of time

I spent a lot of time on

Photoshop. I taught my self how

to design because I figured

it would be pretty fun to learn

how to do that. I taught myself

through forums and tutorials

and all that fun stuff. It was

all about wanting to create

something out of nothing.

I studied marketing and I also

did a minor in politic science

I wanted to study something

that was completely unrelated

to tech, that was in liberal

arts so that I could learn how

people on the other side of

the table were thinking

and it was very enlighten. I was

able to learn a lot about

perspectives around politic

theory and one of the things

it helped me do was to

understand power structures

and politics is inherently turn

around power and if I could

learn how to navigate these

power structures, I could be

successful in other areas and

so that is what political

science really made me do

I started a web design company,

like every other web

entrepreneur ends up doing at

some point and I called it a

design consultancy and we

basically charged people to

make layouts and it was really

me and my buddy, like, hammering

out code and then sending it off

to someone on a freelance

website to make it all work and

then send it off to that client

and charging a lot

of money for it.

Wasn't work at all. It was just

me spending time, to have fun

and it happened to pay us well.

We were able to pay most of our

college tuition from it, that

was great but other then that,

I didn't think too much of it

After skipping four grades in

school and finishing college at

only 18, he decided to move

to San Francisco.

I realized if I were to do

something meaningful for the

rest of my life it had to be in

a city that was larger,

that had more money in it and

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