The Rise of Tech Teentrepreneurs
May 16, 2011
Please don’t tell Daniel Brusilovsky his business idea is cute. “If I wanted to be cute, I wouldn’t be sitting in your office, taking a cab from the train station,” Brusilovsky says. “I am real. I have an idea that’s truly unique and potentially something big.”
“You’re young, you live at home and you don’t have to pay mortgage and bills. There’s only a [short] time in your life where you don’t have to worry about that.”
That something big was an idea for connecting teenage entrepreneurs to mentors through a business and tech incubator — one that Brusilovsky, an 18-year-old from San Mateo, Calif., is putting into action through the Teens in Tech Labs Incubator. The company started as a social network for young media producers, an online-based way for technical entrepreneurs to connect with one another. It eventually turned into a one-day conference. “That was just a one-day event,” Brusilovsky says. “Imagine if we had more than one day to build entrepreneurship. And that’s where the idea of the incubator came from.”
An incubator is a business program aimed at developing an entrepreneurial concept into a company through mentorship and continued support. Start-up companies graduate from incubators after at least one to three years in hopes of continuing to grow on their own.
Billion-dollar People
This summer, five teens from across the country will fly to Silicon Valley, armed with their unique tech ideas, and connect with more than 50 mentors for a hands-on program that will help turn their ideas into reality. Brusilovsky, who is keeping the names of the five teens and their ideas under wraps, plans to unveil the projects during a demo day in early August. The potential startups include two mobile applications, a social-based web application, a developer tool and an education application. “All have one overlapping category — all are young entrepreneurs who want to learn as much as possible,” Brusilovsky notes. “We’re not looking for billion-dollars ideas, we’re looking for billion-dollar people. Because we know the people can build a billion-dollar idea.”
Brusilovsky’s move toward teen tech entrepreneur mentorship is a trendy one, especially as high school students like Cyrus Pishevar, a 13-year-old from Palo Alto who developed the successful Facebook App High School Memories, show their strength as web innovators. In September, for example, Facebook investor Peter Thiel pledged to make 20 grants of as much as $100,000 apiece to teenagers with startup ideas. “We need to encourage young Americans to take more risks,” said Thiel, who co-founded PayPal Inc.
Brusilovsky is a risk taker from way back. A guy who “doesn’t feel right” if he’s not doing two or three things at once, Brusilovsky not only runs the Teens in Tech Incubator, but also attends college classes in Silicon Valley and works for a creative agency in Washington, D.C. He has also been a marketing evangelist for Qik, a video-casting service that was eventually bought by Skype. He began launching startups at a young age and says that even though some venture capitalists described him as “cute,” youth can sometimes be a great advantage. “You’re young, you live at home and you don’t have to pay mortgage and bills,” Brusilovsky says. “There’s only a [short] time in your life where you don’t have to worry about that.”
The ‘Funny Language’ of Entrepreneurship
According to Shonika Proctor, who runs Renegade CEOs, a blog for young entrepreneurs, “It’s not the limits of society, it’s the limits of oneself,” that can interfere with launching young entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur herself, Proctor started young and made enough money from selling a cell phone business to now work as a volunteer mentoring the next generation of business owners. Her recent blog posts suggest she is truly tapped into the young entrepreneur circuit: “Brian Wong, 19, Raises $4 Million VC [Venture Capital] for Kiip,” “Grace Li, 15, 100K Letters to Japan & New Huff Post Column,” and “3 Young Entrepreneurs Selected for Start Up Chile.”
“Most people who are entrepreneurs don’t say they want to start a business. They say, ‘I want to invent something or I want to help something,’” says Proctor. Mentors can especially help young entrepreneurs through the process. Proctor, 38, remembers a student who wanted to start a business but felt daunted. “He said, ‘To me it’s like the SAT; they use all this funny language.’”
Young entrepreneurs interested in exploring their ideas and their markets can find a number of online resources. Brusilovsky recommends what many consider time wasters: YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. He used YouTube videos to learn how to code, and networked using Facebook and Twitter, finding other entrepreneurs as well as potential investors. “They were blocking Twitter at school,” Brusilovsky recalls, “but what are you going to gain from that? Sure, people watch silly cat movies, but a lot of people spend time learning things.”
Brusilovsky’s Teens in Tech presentation will be held at the Palo Alto Research Center, which he calls the “birthplace of technology life.” As members of the next generation of technical entrepreneurs present their ideas to the world, they will ruminate on those who came before them — inventors of the fax machine, the mouse and the Ethernet, Brusilovsky says. “We’re bringing the future and history of technology together.”
Source: www.kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu
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Meet Tech Teentrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky
By Chris Albrecht,Jun. 27, 2008
Dropping out of college to launch your own company? Yawn. The real startup action is in the halls of your local high school. Case in point: Daniel Brusilovsky, the 15-year-old founder and CEO (yes, the CEO) of TeensinTech.com.
Brusilovsky was easy to spot at our recent Structure 08 conference — he was the only one who needed his parents to pick him up from the event. But don’t let his age fool you; he’s got the executive lingo down pat. He’s raising his first round of funding, meeting with lawyers, and name-dropping the likes of Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble (both of whom are on his board). Oh, and when he’s not CEO’ing, Brusilovsky is crashing industry events as an evangelist for mobile vidcasting service Qik.
So adept at startup-speak was Brusilovsky that my only surprise was that he didn’t mention who he’s in talks with to acquire his (not-quite existing) company or that he’s on the waiting list to buy a new Tesla (once he gets his driver’s license, that is).
Brusilovsky is similar to another teentrepreneur on the other side of the camera, 14-year-old Lucas Cruikshank, who’s high-pitched “Fred” videos not only dominate YouTube but have pulled in a five-figure sponsor.
Teens in Tech will be a community for kids who typically get kicked off other new media outlets for being too young to create and share their work. Brusilovsky was nice enough to chat for a few minutes at Structure about his company.
Get to know him now. After all, you could be working for him someday.
Source: www.gigaom.com
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Palo Alto 13-Year-Old Joins Generation of Zuckerberg Wannabes
By Douglas MacMillan - Apr 12, 2011
The Facebook application High School Memories lets people share recollections of their teenage years. It might surprise some users to learn that the app’s creator isn’t old enough for high school himself.
Cyrus Pishevar, a 13-year-old resident of Palo Alto, California, developed High School Memories after seeing how popular it was for his friends to “tag” photos of one another on the social network.
“The big idea is to make memories a social thing to do,” said Cyrus, who learned entrepreneurship from his dad, the founder of five startups. “When you type in your memories, it speaks more than just pictures can, especially when your friends help you through.”
Cyrus is part of Silicon Valley’s second generation of Web innovators -- teenagers who grew up with the Internet and witnessed the rapid ascent of Facebook Inc. and other nearby companies. Raised by technology workers and introduced to computers and business early on, many of the area’s youngsters have chosen to build their own apps or start whole companies in lieu of after-school sports or summer camps.
“I was surrounded by tech everyday for so long that I gained a natural interest for it,” said Daniel Brusilovsky, an 18-year-old from San Mateo, California, whose upbringing by a software-manager father and Oracle Corp. (ORCL) veteran mother led him to found two startups before he was old enough to vote.
Fewer Skills Needed
It’s easier for teens to become Web entrepreneurs these days because writing software is cheaper and simpler, said Daniel Gross, the 19-year-old founder of San Francisco-based Internet-search startup Greplin Inc.
“The tools require less expert knowledge,” Gross said. “Building a Facebook app doesn’t require you to have four years of computer science.”
Mentoring programs also have sprung up to help young entrepreneurs build their companies. In September, Facebook investor Peter Thiel pledged to make 20 grants of as much as $100,000 apiece to teenagers with startup ideas. He says he wants teens to pursue their dreams, rather than college, because traditional education steers them away from entrepreneurship and into steady jobs.
“We need to encourage young Americans to take more risks,” Thiel, who co-founded PayPal Inc. and now runs the investment firm Clarium Capital Management, said in an interview at the time.
‘Child Soldiers’
Such efforts have drawn criticism for encouraging students to drop out, in the same way that a dream of playing in the National Basketball Association might prevent some kids from staying in school.
Pursuing entrepreneurship shouldn’t come before an education, said Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.
“These are Silicon Valley’s child soldiers,” he said. “The vast majority of them will fail miserably. Then they’ve screwed up their careers.”
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg didn’t drop out of Harvard University until his company was gaining traction, when he was 20. That’s a model that young people should heed, Wadhwa said.
“If by any chance you happen to achieve the success that Zuckerberg did, then drop out of school,” he said. “But don’t screw up your education until you’ve done that.”
Board Meetings
For Cyrus Pishevar, who was present at his dad’s company meetings since he was a toddler, inspiration came well before he had to make decisions about college.
“He used to crawl between board members’ legs when I had meetings at home,” said Shervin Pishevar, who helped found Web development software maker WebOS Inc., mobile-app startup Social Gaming Network and three other companies, all since 1997.
By the time he was 6, Cyrus was learning how to use a computer and giving feedback to his dad on apps. Last year, Shervin Pishevar introduced him to Zuckerberg, now 26, at a movie screening in Palo Alto. Around that time, the preteen was coming up with his idea for a Facebook app.
Living in Silicon Valley means kids have easy access to programming help. With High School Memories, Cyrus got assistance from Ryan Romanchuk, a 25-year-old engineer and family friend who works at a nearby startup. His father, meanwhile, is contributing $5,000 to $10,000 to the project, mostly to pay for advertising.
Homework First
Cyrus works on the app most days after he finishes his homework, in Palo Alto coffee shops or the garage of Social Gaming Network’s headquarters, a two-story house converted into an office near Stanford University’s campus.
Romanchuk, an employee of social shopping site Blippy, has helped him write code and solve problems that arise, such as how to get more new users coming in through ads purchased on Facebook. If the app takes off, Cyrus plans to expand the service into a separate website with more features, as well as a version for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone.
Brusilovsky began a startup incubator, Teens in Tech Labs, this year to support other young innovators. Even the most entrepreneurial teens don’t always make good decisions, he said. Brusilovsky himself was fired from an internship last year at the technology blog TechCrunch for accepting gifts from startups in exchange for coverage.
Another challenge: Young entrepreneurs aren’t taken seriously by venture capitalists.
‘Really Cute’
“When I was pitching VCs three years ago, the first thing they said was, ‘That is really cute,’” Brusilovsky said. “I don’t want to be cute, I am serious about this.”
Teens in Tech Labs, based in Palo Alto, will select five teams of entrepreneurs in the summer and connect them with accomplished mentors, including Kevin Hartz, co-founder of Eventbrite, and David Hornik, a partner at venture capital firm August Capital.
“These entrepreneurs might not have a billion-dollar idea today,” but preparation helps, Brusilovsky said. “When they’re done with high school or college, then maybe they will have a billion-dollar idea and they will know what to do with it.”
Still, parents of would-be Mark Zuckerbergs are careful to preserve a degree of childhood normalcy. Cyrus takes kung fu lessons every week.
“I make sure he takes the time to be a kid,” his dad said.
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