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Young
CEOs who rule the tech world
This
Universe Trends |
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Young CEOs who rule the tech world
JOSH
Buckley, chief executive officer (CEO) of an online gaming start-up, is looking forward to next month’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, particularly for the parties and the accompanying schmoozing with industry A-listers. There’s one problem: Buckley, who turned 20 this week, may be turned away from many of the parties because he is not old enough to drink. His fake ID was recently confiscated, and the two new ones he ordered from a company in China have not yet arrived. Such are the dilemmas facing the ever-younger entrepreneurs that Silicon Valley investors are backing these days. While little data on the phenomenon exists, venture capitalists say they are funding more chief executives under age 21 than ever before. “At a certain point, they can’t get much younger or we’re going to be invested in preschool,” quipped Marc Andreessen, whose venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is one of several that backs Buckley’s company, MinoMonsters. Andreessen and other venture capitalists say the entrepreneurs they fund at 18 or 19 typically have been prepping for years—learning computer code, taking on ambitious freelance projects and educating themselves on the Internet. Some are self-consciously molding themselves in the image of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 27, who created computer games as a child and was taking a graduate-level computer course by his early teens. Internet businesses that target consumers make a sweet spot for the baby-faced, because online companies often require relatively little capital. A semiconductor start-up might require $10 milion to $20 million in the early stages, noted Joe Kraus of Google Ventures, and that would be tough even for the most talented youngster. “If I’m going to write that big a check, I’m going to invest in people who’ve done it before,” he said. “But if you look at it as, ‘Hey, I’m going to raise $500,000,’ there’s a lot of ways to raise that.” Kraus helped back Airy Labs, an educational social-gaming company run by 20-year-old Andrew Hsu that raised $1.5 million. Hsu is now learning the same hard lessons as many of his elders: the company recently laid off staff and is looking to rent out some of its office space in Palo Alto, California. Hsu said the company is taking a different direction and focusing on a line of new products in math, language arts and science. Kraus said his biggest hiccups with young entrepreneurs are the business references they don’t understand because they are too young to be aware of them. Andreessen says more than one young entrepreneur has asked him: “What did Netscape do again?” Andreessen co-founded Netscape, which developed the first commercial Web browser and helped launch the Internet era, shortly after graduating from college in 1993. “I was 9 years old during the first Internet boom,” says Brian Wong, 20, who runs reward-network Kiip. He has had his fill of stories about companies that tanked amid the dot-com bust of 2000. The first time he heard the name Webvan, a legendary dot-com failure, “I had to look it up,” he recalled. Wong has raised more than $4 million from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and others. He believes his age helps him and other youthful entrepreneurs. “You’re expected to be limitless,” he said. “Kind of destructive.” While the freewheeling ways of youth may be a positive for venture capitalists, they are less appreciated by landlords. Tim Chae, the 20-year-old chief executive and co-founder of social-media marketing company PostRocket, said his age and lack of credit created problems when he moved to San Francisco last year and needed an apartment. Finally, his father had to drive the 88 miles from Sacramento to co-sign a lease. Chae, a Babson College dropout, now lives in Mountain View and attends 500 Startups, a crash course for young companies run by a venture firm of the same name. He has raised a small amount of capital and hopes the upcoming Facebook IPO will help investors look more kindly on young entrepreneurs. “Thank God for Zuckerberg,” he says. Zuckerberg, who left Harvard after two years, is helping recast the notion of dropping out of college. Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook and a co-founder of PayPal, is encouraging others to try that path through two-year fellowships for students who take a break from school, move to San Francisco and pursue their entrepreneurial aspirations. That’s what 17-year-old Laura Deming did when she won a fellowship based on her goal of finding and funding anti-aging technologies and left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Because she is not yet 18, she finds herself faxing documents such as non-disclosure agreements to her dad back in Boston to co-sign. Other young entrepreneurs have trouble negotiating the highways and byways of Silicon Valley quite literally. Sahil Lavingia, 19, recalls a day last summer when he had several meetings scheduled on Sand Hill Road—home to many of the nation’s leading venture-capital firms—and no car to get there. The journey of just a few miles took hours by the time Lavingia rode a local train a couple of stops, caught a bus to Stanford University and then hopped a shuttle bus to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, which is on Sand Hill Road. Another time, dreading the combination of a hot day and a sweaty walk around Palo Alto, he pulled on a pair of shorts, even though he was heading to a meeting with blue-chip VC Accel Partners. The outfit—casual even by laid-back Silicon Valley standards—didn’t stop Accel from investing. Lavingia, an alumnus of hot online bulletin-board company Pinterest, raised $1.1 million for his payments start-up, Gumroad. Buckley also ran into problems getting himself to Sand Hill Road. One night he stayed up until 3 a.m. and slept too late to get to a scheduled meeting with a venture-capital firm. “It didn’t go down too well,” he said, adding that his profuse apologies and requests to reschedule were met with a curt “no thank you.” Not to worry. Buckley, who had already sold a company while in high school for a sum he says was in the low six figures, raised more than $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others. At the time of the missed meeting, he was attending Y Combinator, a three-month program for start-ups. In a nod to the boy wizard of book and movie fame, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has called Buckley “the Harry Potter of startups,” but said he was not the youngest to win admission to the program. That honour goes to John Collison, now co-founder of payment company Stripe, who was admitted at age 16, but did not go through the program, Graham says. Instead, he and his then-19-year-old brother merged their company with another, Auctomatic, and sold it to a Canadian company for $5 million in cash and stock. Most of the young entrepreneurs say their interest lies in building rather than selling their companies. Buckley had to say as much in response to inquiries he said received recently from Facebook about a possible sale. His determination not to sell stems from advice he received from a successful executive he met last year at Y Combinator: Mark Zuckerberg.
— Reuters
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This Universe What is the weight of the Earth? You have asked a tough question. You weigh things by putting them on a balance. “Balancing” requires comparing with something, say a set of heavy objects and a way of finding out whether they exert the same amount of pull or push. But where do we
find a comparable heavy object and even more important, how do we find a trick, a mechanism or a machine that its pull would be the same as that of the Earth. As for as the mechanism or the machine is concerned, you could point to a physical balance. Fine, I would say, but where do I put this balance? No, this would not work. You would agree. In fact, an answer to this question was not found for a long time. The first hint came when Keplers’ laws of revolution of planets of the solar system were discovered. We came to know that the relative masses of various planets could be derived from the observed periods of various planets. Kepler and Newton gave us the shape of the planetary system but not its absolute size. We needed to get the absolute distance between any two planets and then we would know the size of the solar system. Then, using Newton’s law of gravitational attraction, the value of the gravitational constant, and one of the absolute distances of planets (and therefore also the distance of the Sun from the Earth), we also came to know the mass of the Earth! This is the fascinating story of how we came to know the masses and distances of planets of the solar system. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at palyash.pal@gmail.com
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Trends GENEVA/CHICAGO: The world of science was upended last year when an experiment appeared to show one of Einstein's fundamental theories was wrong - but now the lab behind it says the result could have been caused by a loose cable. Physicists at the CERN research institute near Geneva appeared to contradict Albert Einstein's 1905 Special Theory of Relativity last year when they reported that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster than light. Scientists seek partners for medical isotope process TORONTO: Several companies are in talks with Canadian scientists on commercialising a new method to produce a crucial medical isotope without using feedstock from a nuclear reactor, one of the lead scientists said. Researchers at the TRIUMF physics lab in Vancouver, British Columbia, say their method, showcased at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings in Vancouver, would produce technetium-99m without using feedstock molybdenum-99, which is mainly produced at nuclear reactors using enriched uranium.
— Reuters |
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