If I was in their shoes and I got featured like this, I am not sure I could go without getting a big head. Which sucks because it is one thing to make f-u money and get a big head. It is another to be recognized in a way that millionaires are often recognized--except you don't have the millions yet.
My advice to them would be to IGNORE the crap out of this. And keep doing the great work! The ones that get too sucked up in remaining on this list for next year or hating themselves for not making it are moving away from what made them awesome to begin with.
What bothers me about posts like this is the unspoken underlying assumption that the younger you are when you start, the more "valuable" you are as an entrepreneur. Like, if you start at 12 then you're a better person than you are if you start at 13. There's a similar age obsession in writing and in fencing, both of which I was involved in during high school. I find that certain other fields, music especially, are a bit more level-headed.
I don't know about music being level headed. It's not uncommon for parents who think their kid is a prodigy to have them in violin classes at age 3 or 4. I don't know if the music community itself thinks this is good or bad, though.
Practice at a young age isn't a bad thing. But the music community, while it acknowledges prodigies, usually doesn't appreciate music more or less based on age. The first example that comes to mind is Chris Thile, who was in a Grammy Award-winning band at 12. He was a prodigy, yes, but he became famous not for that but for the music he produced.
As one of the people featured in that article, I would agree with you. A lot of what the industry calls 'teen entrepreneurs' are teens first, entrepreneurs second. That is to say, the industry collectively cuts teen entrepreneurs slack because they're teens, which is counterproductive not only the industry but to the individuals themselves.
The less popular alternative definition and the one I strive to achieve is an entrepreneur who is also a teen. And in this case, when they do something that deviates from the standard entrepreneur, there isn't the excuse of 'oh--that's okay--he's a teen!!11'
Although that doesn't mean I won't reap the rewards of starting out early. :)
That's the biggest trap many of these kids will need to avoid. When you are a kid everything is cute and celebrated. I say that having been there! Then you slowly grow up and realize all that stuff doesn't matter that much. Especially in light of things like revenue and profit.
Wisdom and experience is the function of age if and only if you got a nice feedback mechanism to drive you in the correct direction.
Even so, a strong curiosty is required to exploit any unorthodox opportunities to increase not only your wisdom, experience, but also knowledge as well.
Entrepeneurship at an early age is an excellent way to increase wisdom.
Sometimes I don't get why people like to talk about what they did when they were young in our industry so much.
You see stuff like : I started writing Basic when I was 8 months old, and by the time I was 2, I was using interrupts to force a pipeline recache that would cause Pentium2 processors to execute 5 instructions in quasi parallel mode, so that I could do a realtime render of my backstreet boys collection...
Another common thing is: Person in question started selling lemonade when he was 7 and by the time he was 8, he had 15 extra lemonade stands staffed by his friends...
Almost without exception, when you read such bios of people, and those people write those bios by themselves, then they never amount to anything when they get older.
Why am I saying this? Because the techcrunch synopsis about each of those enterprenuer is almost directly lifted from each of their websites. Click on their 'About' pages.
Apart from Mark Bao of course, he's just a cool cat.
Steve Wozniak definitely fits the description of someone who was doing cool stuff while young. Of course, there was no techcrunch back then to widely announce to the whole world how he'd built a calculator from scratch. Maybe that's what it takes to keep your head cool and focused.
Let's put it this way: they started maybe a decade, maybe two decades, ahead of everybody else. They're able to make a LOT more mistakes without suffering for it than anybody else. Even entrepreneurs starting early into their 20s don't have as near-perfect a sandbox for their efforts.
Unhealthy obsession with youth? Maybe. But not unwarranted, I think. Either way, this has got to be plenty more educational for them than what they're getting at school.
they started maybe a decade, maybe two decades, ahead of everybody else
A big assumption you seem to be making is that these kids will keep progressing at the current rate.
I actually think for most of these kids, they will hit a plateau and exhaustion point a lot sooner where they may dabble in stuff they did not when they were younger. There is NOTHING wrong with that and I have been through this path myself. But it's important to understand that the direction and rate of personal growth is not static. Some of these kids may dabble in drugs tomorrow; some of their stoned classmates may dabble with startups when they are older.
See, this is the problem I have with blog posts like these. These guys are in the teens. Many of them got to this point by following a passion in programming. Now that they are in the limelight, some will start worrying more about their sentence structure and matching their shoes than continuing to get better at whatever got them here.
Of course matching shoes and getting the sentence structures right is very important in life--but not necessarily in your teen years.
Calling someone "worth watching" assumes that he/she has some kind of characteristics, which could possibly make him/her successful. This was written by a teen. Not sure if I trust his judgement on this. There are lots of talented kids out there though, no doubt.
I agree with some of the others. Age discrimination reigns (as the younger crowd who follow HN will find out in 10 to 15 years). Wasn't there a study published recently that showed that a significant number of entrepreneurs (especially the successful ones) were in their 30s and 40s?
As much as I want to hate on this article with the rest of you guys, I can't. I was expecting a load of "Look! Bobby has a blog with AdSense. How cute." But, grammar aside, it surprised me. It's not just Mark in this list who's made actual money. That Ashley girl has been in business 5 years and employs a parent!
Which is a lot more success than (as far as I can tell) the vast majority of HNers.
So, yes, I hate things that focus on age. Sure, by most accounts I was a child prodigy and blah blah blah blah. The age-related attention certainly never did me any good. It made me lazy, and vain, and I think I missed out on a lot of opportunities because of it.
But whether or not these are teens to "watch," they should be considered a challenge for anyone who's clocking all their time on the next revolution in social bookmarking or social network messaging shopping kablooey.
Reality check: Ashley makes enough money to employ herself, a parent, and apparently friends, too... off a site for freeMySpacelayouts.
My advice to them would be to IGNORE the crap out of this. And keep doing the great work! The ones that get too sucked up in remaining on this list for next year or hating themselves for not making it are moving away from what made them awesome to begin with.