Age Is Nothing But A Number In Silicon Valley
“I’m in Silicon Valley. I didn’t want to wait 10 years to build something. I wanted to do it now.”
Elementeo CEO Anshul Samar plans for his startup to reach $1 million in revenue next year … just in time for him to graduate junior high.
The 13 year old seventh grader at Lawson Middle School in Cupertino invented a board game that teaches chemistry to students and is seeking angel funding so it can be mass produced. And so it goes in modern-day Silicon Valley, where age is no obstacle when starting a business. Anshul joined a group of teenagers developing a laser headset along with three Stanford students making online community sites for college campuses. The students, ages 13 to 27, represented the lucrative, tech-savvy youth market businesses have been desperately seeking to tap. They’ve never known a world without technology. They spend hours on Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and more hours talking on cell phones and sending text messages. And those 13 to 18 are spending $195 billion a year.
Young entrepreneurs have come around before. Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as an undergraduate at Harvard. Steve Jobs was 21 and Steve Wozniak 25 when they started Apple. Bay Area high school students freely chatted about using cell phones and iPods to cheat on tests, bypassing the school’s filters to access blocked Web sites and downloading pirated music from file-sharing sites such as LimeWire. They also expressed they couldn’t imagine life without cell phones and the Internet.
