ãã¬ã¼ã®é¬¼æ - San Jose Mercury News
- Valley's wunderkind - San Jose Mercury News (05/18/2008 01:41:13 AM PDT By Scott Duke Harris)
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, at 23, has been described as America's youngest self-made billionaire. Tech's latest wonderboy may also be Exhibit A for a broader phenomenon - an extraordinary new iteration of young entrepreneurs eager to change the digital landscape.
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Never before has Silicon Valley witnessed so much young moxie, veteran investors say. Youthful entrepreneurs have become commonplace in the valley, attracting millions of dollars in venture capital.
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Strikingly, many are in their early 20s or younger - and were in elementary school when the world first learned to surf the Internet. Now they are coming of age when the Web has matured into a robust global marketplace and software advances have driven down development costs.
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Young techies "see the landscape and want to jump in even sooner, without getting a job in industry first," said angel investor Ron Conway, who says he has invested in 125 start-ups since 2005. "They are leaping right into the start-up world."
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Photo-sharing innovator Kristopher Tate was only 17 when Conway offered seed financing for the 2-year-old start-up now known as Zooomr; his parents had to sign the contract. Several other start-ups, including Facebook, were launched in college dorms; their founders left school to seize the moment. Recent grads are spurning handsome job offers from tech giants like Google and Microsoft to pursue start-up dreams. A few young founders are already serial entrepreneurs.
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Adil Lalani, for example, is the 21-year-old co-founder of EatLime, a new video-sharing service. Lalani began building his first Web service at age 16 - and sold it for $1.25 million during his freshman year at Canada's University of Waterloo. He left Waterloo to launch his new start-up in Toronto, before relocating to Silicon Valley.
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Lalani's business partner, 23-year-old Mohammad Al Adham, seems almost embarrassed about his diploma: "My mother was like, 'You cannot leave school! There is no way you're not graduating!' "
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EatLime is fine-tuning financial terms with several angel investors and one prominent venture capital firm. "I love the EatLime guys," said Tim Draper, founder of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
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Modern technology has a way of empowering the precocious, in part because it is often tough for older techies to learn new tricks. Zuckerberg may be the latest addition to a pantheon that includes such game-changers as Microsoft's Bill Gates, Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Netscape's Marc Andreessen and Napster's Shawn Fanning.
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And thanks to the epic success of Gates, Jobs and now Zuckerberg, budding entrepreneurs "no longer get as much grief from their parents. Their friends think it is cool," said Draper. VCs "are perfectly willing to take a chance on these whippersnappers because we know there is a chance they can become huge."
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While Facebook has a global following, several youth-led start-ups are getting buzz in the valley. Their very names, too, reflect this digital age: Loopt, Scribd, Tokbox, Xobni, Box.net, WeGame, Weebly and You Noodle.
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Advancing technology has also afforded today's young techies with social advantages their elders lack. Kevin Hartz, a 38-year-old serial entrepreneur and angel investor, recalled that while he had his own Commodore 64 computer, his geeky peers weren't so fortunate. "You had to go to the school computer lab to work on a computer and risk ostracism and wedgies," he said. "Now everyone is on a computer and the Internet."
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The academic and business world is fostering youthful entrepreneurship as never before. YCombinator, a trailblazing bi-coastal incubator program led by entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham, specializes in seeding young start-ups.
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Meanwhile, Hartz recently teamed up with Jawed Karim, who helped Chad Hurley and Steve Chen develop YouTube, and Slide executive Keith Rabois in forming Youniversity Ventures. They coach budding entrepreneurs at Stanford University and the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, Karim's alma mater, while scouting investment opportunities.
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Karim knows about starting young. He was 20 when he left college to work for PayPal, later returning to earn his degree. He was 25 when he teamed up with Hurley and Chen; Karim left YouTube before its sale to Google to pursue an advanced degree at Stanford.
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One recent day, the Youniversity crew spent several hours at Stanford, advising a procession of four student-led start-ups. Hartz and Rabois could recall only one start-up emerging from their Stanford peers in the early 1990s. Nearly everybody, they said, first went to work for a big company.
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Al Adham and Lalani are typical of this new generation. The pair exudes energy, intelligence, optimism, confidence - prerequisites for successful young entrepreneurs. What YouTube did for bringing video to the masses, they say, EatLime will do for sharing video privately, with security and unprecedented speed. Check out our Web site, they say.
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The EatLime guys say they have other cool ideas too - but it's too soon to talk about those.
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