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The growth of the Internet has changed small startups to some

of the most influential companies in the world.

Behind these companies are more often than not young visionary

entrepreneurs who grew up with the Internet and now seem best

positioned to direct the future of the web.

Who are these new entrepreneurs and what drives them?

A really great founder seems to be building a groundswell even

if there is nothing there, and so he in effect is a magician.

He creates something from nothing.

You are always kind of just on the edge of your comfort zone

and everything you are doing is basically something you are just

barely qualified for or not qualified for, it is like

jumping off a cliff and having to build your own parachute

I think an entrepreneur, that is A difficult one, how do you

define an entrepreneur. I think an entrepreneur is a person who

dares to have a dream that not that many people have and even

more importantly dares to chase it with their money where their

mouth is and their time and their career and dares to take

the risk to going out there to realize that vision.

Entrepreneurs are some of the craziest people you ever meet,

they are people who have a dream or an idea, something that keeps

them awake at night and they get the opportunity to hopefully

solve that problem or do something about it.

So the best entrepreneurs are often either solving their own

problems or solving some huge things and they can really

Entrepreneurship at the moment is kind of like the new smoking,

it's cool to be creative and it is cool to be making something

and I just love that energy.

Over the last couple of years the cost of starting

a web-based startup has decreased dramatically.

I think over the last couple Of years it has changed

dramatically. If you think back to the turn of the century,

two thousand, what you had was very large companies often

creating websites like Yahoo, AOL, these were much bigger

companies creating new kind of products on the internet.

With the crash those went away but the Internet didn't go away

and what actually happens was that new initiative, young

innovators came along looked at the web and said we can do

Ten years ago if you wanted to start-up a company you got to

pay a lawyer to tell you weather you should do a "C" Corp or

a "LLC". Bam, that is a Google search, done, free, in like five

minutes. You know by that time you would not even gone past the

lawyer secretary ten years ago.

It is really interesting to see What entrepreneurs will look

like ten years from now. Before they were managers, maybe little

engineering but now they are young tech people and hackers

Anybody now with a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection

can build anything

Today a lot of people will be able to start companies who

never could have before. This applies specially to younger

people. They are willing to put in the long, unpaid hours

and have nothing to loose.

As you get older you get certain ways and certain patterns and

you recognize them and behave in certain way but I think that the

young entrepreneurs see things differently in a way that is often

times refreshing and therefore groundbreaking.

One of the great benefits of starting young in business is

that you have less to lose than you know, once you have four

kids and something where you have to re-mortgage your house

in order to finance your company, that is a bigger risk

to take then if you come straight out of university and

all you kind of have to choose between is either you take up

a job or you start a crazy company to do crazy thing

I have met kids out here who are still teenager and starting

companies and all the way down to sixteen years old, which is

pretty crazy when you think about it.

Younger people have been affected by less and they are

often times more idealistic and they have bigger dreams and

bigger vision because they do not know, necessary,

It doesn't really matter to me, I could be fifty for all I care

because removing the age element is really what I think,

what makes the Silicon Valley area so fascinating. That I know

so many people that could be really young or really old,

they still take you seriously, they will still listen to you.

And that is why there is culture of listening that is so

conducive to entrepreneurship which is why this area is so

valuable to people

Brian Wong grew up in Vancouver Canada. At 19 he had raised

4,3 million dollars in funding for his company, Kiip, a reward

network where you play games on your phone and get real rewards

through Kiip's network.

My parents at one point thought I was addicted to my computer

and wanted to take it away from me and I'm glad that

they ended up not doing that but I spent, like, eight to ten

hours a day on my computer this was at a point when I was very

addicted to Counter Strike Source, which is a first person

shooter game which was extremely popular when I was young and

still very much is and I spent hours and hours playing that

game to maintain my top of server status and I was at the

top of like three servers and it takes a lot of time

I spent a lot of time on Photoshop. I taught my self how

to design because I figured it would be pretty fun to learn

how to do that. I taught myself through forums and tutorials

and all that fun stuff. It was all about wanting to create

something out of nothing.

I studied marketing and I also did a minor in politic science

I wanted to study something that was completely unrelated

to tech, that was in liberal arts so that I could learn how

people on the other side of the table were thinking

and it was very enlighten. I was able to learn a lot about

perspectives around politic theory and one of the things

it helped me do was to understand power structures

and politics is inherently turn around power and if I could

learn how to navigate these power structures, I could be

successful in other areas and so that is what political

science really made me do

I started a web design company, like every other web

entrepreneur ends up doing at some point and I called it a

design consultancy and we basically charged people to

make layouts and it was really me and my buddy, like, hammering

out code and then sending it off to someone on a freelance

website to make it all work and then send it off to that client

and charging a lot of money for it.

Wasn't work at all. It was just me spending time, to have fun

and it happened to pay us well. We were able to pay most of our

college tuition from it, that

was great but other then that, I didn't think too much of it

After skipping four grades in school and finishing college at

only 18, he decided to move to San Francisco.

I realized if I were to do something meaningful for the

rest of my life it had to be in a city that was larger,

that had more money in it and more people I could relate to

and I knew that Silicon Valley was the place to be, so I'm

going to go check it out and see it with my own eyes

was it really "Nerdtopia", as they called it, is it actually

that awesome. So I flew down and cold emailed just people.

I figured, you know, what is the worst thing could happen if I

email all these people and they say no, OK great, I was not even

going to meet with them, in the first place

By emailing people in Silicon Valley Brian managed to get

meetings with some of the world's most respected venture

capitalists and entrepreneurs. He got a job at a startup named

Digg, a popular social content website. Digg had to lay off

40% of their staff, and after only a year Brian was fired.

I had like 2000 dollars left on my bank account, I was about to

go bankrupt, bed was like fifteen hundred, it is not cheap

to live in the city and I remember talking to some of

my friends that I made over the last few months and I was like

hey I have got this idea and they were like, hey I know this

VC, Adam. And I met with Adam for coffee and Adam was like,

well, this is cool, you know, cool pitch, bla bla bla

Usually you never hear back from them ever again but then Adam

the next day called me and he said, hey, you want to do

a partners meeting. I didn't even know what a partners

meeting was, at the time, you know, what is a partners meeting

And I realized it was a very important meeting, clearly,

because that is where they were making the decision and the week

after that I had a term sheet and as a nineteen year old,

sitting looking down at that many zeros you are freaking out

because this is the most amazing thing you have seen in your

whole life then I realized it was my ticket, it was a very

chance thing, I got very lucky.

True Ventures's investment made Brian able to start the company

he had dreamed about. He was 19 years old at the time which

makes him the youngest person to ever receive funding by

a venture capital firm, beating founder of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg by one year.

Next 6 months was very clear to me beyond that I couldn't see

anything, but I didn't really care because I knew we had six

months or less to prove a lot out so it was just a race

against time to make things happen and I was so determined

to sit down, and be like, I'm not leaving this room until

something happens and this is going to make the world

a completely different world in the next few years and you are

going to help me change that and people were there to be a part

of this vision and I couldn't thank them more, there were lot

of very early supporters that believed in this crazy Asian kid

and his random idea about real rewards and virtual achievements

it is like the people who have supported me, I thank them and

they are part of their lives even till this day

Being an Internet entrepreneur is hard work. The freedom of

not having a boss comes with strings attached.

Vacations disappear into the mist of long hours, money

problems and sleepless nights. Bootstrapping, the art of

building a business with little

or no money, is the most common way to start a company today.

Sometimes I get worried about these young entrepreneurs who

spend 10 years trying to be the next Steve Jobs or Mark

Zuckerberg and they are sitting in a dark room coding and they

miss out of the best years of their lives. You need to

When I was an entrepreneur and I think still now, it was, go to

sleep after a long night of coding you wake up late usually

because you just need to sleep. You drink a lot of soda, eat a

lot of junk food, you don't dress necessary that well, I

didn't dress that well, and you kind of just work all the time

and that is your entire life.

It is always a roller-coaster ride, you know, every time I

hang out with one of my entrepreneur friends, it is

always like, let's just get it out of the way, are you on,

like, are you on a high part of the cycle or are you down in the

depths because it is pretty much going to dictate how the dinner

or the meeting goes, you know, a lot of times, people are like:

we are killing it, we are going to change the world, and you

like talk to them tomorrow and they are like, dude, I don't

know why I am doing this, I should have just been a banker.

This is the most manic depressive way you can possibly

live life, right, you are never having a good day, you are

either having the best day ever or you think you're about to die

I know people who run a startup who manage to balance things and

do other stuff in life as well. I'm not one of those people.

Alexander Ljung is the CEO and co-founder of SoundCloud,

an audio platform that enables anybody to upload sounds on to

the web. SoundCloud is one of the fastest growing companies

in the music world. The company's headquarters are in

Berlin but because of their fast growth they have opened an

office in San Francisco so Alexander splits his time

between Berlin and Silicon Valley.

Alexander grew up in Sweden and went to the Royal Institute

of Technology in Stockholm where he studied human computer Interaction.

I didn't have the typical entrepreneur background of, you

know, opening up a lemonade stand and, you know, selling

magazines to the neighborhood, but I realized in hindsight like

that, I was always doing these intense projects.

I would come up with an idea and then, you know, cut out

everything else in my world and only focus on that idea so in

that way I was very entrepreneurial in terms of

doing projects and creating things but it wasn't in business

sense but I definitely always had the tendency to go, you

know, over the top with project that I was doing, weather it was

installation of interactive shoes that made noises or ping

pong table that you could make music with or what ever it might

be so I had a strong drive to create things, but it wasn't,

I didn't think of it as business quality or anything like that.

Alexander met his co-founder Eric Wahlforss, in college when

they bonded over being the only ones using Mac computers.

They both had a background in music and were familiar with the

problem of collaborating with other musicians. They decided to

create SoundCloud to solve that problem.

In the beginning we were really excited but I think it was, we

were more excited about it because like we wanted this

product, and we were like, this has to exist because then we can

do this and we can do that. I think we were so obsessed with

what it would do for us that we didn't necessarily see the full

potential of how big of an impact we could actually have on

the web and the world outside of it.

After graduation in 2007 he and Eric decided to move away from

Stockholm to be able to focus totally on building of the

company. They traveled around Europe looking for the best

place for a tech startup.

We went on a trip to London, Barcelona, Vienna and Berlin

Berlin was the last stop, and the idea was just to feel out

the city a little bit and see if it would be were we wanted to

move. We were in Berlin and we were there for about a day, I

think, and we immediately thought, okay, this is the

place. There are so many creative people here. It's a

good tech scene so actually that same evening when we got back to

Stockholm, we were like, you know what, screw it, we are

moving to Berlin next week. We took one week, rented out our

apartments, packed a big suitcase and then moved over to

Berlin, and the next week we set up an office at a local café

there, and, yeah, it turned out to be even better than we

thought, so we stayed.

You know, a lot of people talk about bootstrapped startups but

that was like, should be in the dictionary of bootstrap. I mean

we literally, moved over with a rucksack each and that was it,

We were in a café, and then our next office was a conference

room of a friends start-up, I think we lived there for a

couple of days, then they kicked us out. We found our own office

which was this, almost like an old abandoned attic, were we

pulled the cable outside the window to get internet in there.

We had five good chairs in Stockholm, we had gotten them

from another entrepreneur for free, so those we decided to

bring down from Stockholm to Berlin, so I think we had a

friend who took them in his car or something, and then we were

rolling them around Berlin.

The music scene in Berlin is fantastic so on the weekends we

would be out clubbing at all these fantastic Berlin clubs,

from Friday until Sunday evening and then, you know, back on

Monday, just like coding, you know, the whole week through,

and I thing that went on for like half the year or something

just no break what so ever.

In October 2008 SoundCloud launched their product after

being in private beta for more than a year.

When we decided to open the site for the public, we thought, well

we are in Berlin, so the right way to do that is at a club,

so we actually threw a launch party at a club that our friends

have called Picnic. We actually launched at twelve o'clock at

night at the club, like, we had Sean, our chief architect was

sitting upstairs in a small room with a laptop deploying the site

and we were like, Eric and I were behind the DJ desk

launching the site on the dance floor and we were just like

okay, it's going to crash, it's going to crash, but it survived

it survived the whole night and the morning after, I was a bit

tired but, first thing, when we woke up, were just like, is the

site online and it was online. We started seeing, we had

sign-ups through the night and from there on we were

open and full on.

Alexander drew attention to his company in a creative way.

It involved a leather jacket and some spray-paint.

Every time I was doing a talk at a conference I made sure that I

had some point in the talk were I could turn around so that

people could see this jacket, the back of it. It's good, like,

there was pictures of this jacket, all over the web and

people were talking about it because it looked kind of cool

and I know so many investors that remember that jacket so

that was actually a good thing for us to, you know, to get the

VCs who see tens of new start-ups every day, to actually

remember ours, and so you know, a jacket, some spray-paint, and

a cheap H&M jacket, it was probably, you know, a pretty

good 50 euro marketing stunt.

SoundCloud now has more than 10 million users and 60 million

dollars in funding. Their users include such high profile

musicians as Rhianna and Kylie Minouge.

You know, almost, everybody in the company, knew about it.

I had this thing that the day that Björk signs up I'm going to

take the day off, then we are done and it was probably about

6 months ago that she signed up in preparation for the new album

and started posting this really awesome little sound bites where

she was talking about the new album and that just made my day

and then I was just, okay, I have to take the day off and ten

minutes later I realized that the only thing I wanted to do at

my day off was to work, so then I ended up going back to the

computer and actually ended up working that day anyway.

To turn an idea into reality the entrepreneurs often need to meet

additional costs. That's where the investors enter the picture.

They give the entrepreneurs funding in exchange for a part

of their company. Venture capital firms and angel

investors are attracted to start-ups because of their

potential to grow rapidly for a limited investment.

Well I think, that angels tend to be private individuals

people who have probably had successful businesses themselves

in the past, and now they are looking to invest some of their

own capital into early stage companies and they are usually

doing it partly to get a return, to make some more money but

partly, also because they enjoy doing it, they see it as a great

way of mentoring and working with young people in early stage

companies a venture capitalist is someone who is really doing

that as a job so we have typically raised money from

bigger funds like pension funds, like government and we are doing it,

to basically return money to our shareholders.

If I'm loaning money to someone, I kind of want them to succeed,

but mostly I just want them to pay me back. In the case of

making an investment in a business, I want them to succeed

really big.

The process of venture capital is either we find you or you

find us and generally when we are looking for you, that is a

good thing. When you come to find us, it is more of a shot in

the dark, fifty-fifty.

First and second time you start a company, it is very difficult

to get VC money instantly, you have to know some angels and it

is also a very good education to have some angels to help you out

who can then take you to the VCs because if you are just fresh

out of school you do not know the VCs, you don't even know

what a VC mean, maybe you think it is a toilet.

You give your pitch and you meet all these different investors

and visit the venture capitalists

at their offices down in Menlo Park. You give maybe a half

hour, forty-five minute pitch and you talk to bunch of

different investors and after a series of more meetings then

they decide if they will invest or not.

We raised about a million dollars and the feeling until we

finished raising was the feeling of fear, would any investor buy

into this and would we actually be able to raise the money.

Jessica Mah is the founder and CEO of InDinero, a company that

creates software to help small businesses better track and

manage their finances. Jessica has been building businesses

since she was 12 years old. She finished high school when she

was 15 and at 20 she had raised over a million dollars for her

own startup. I was pretty bored in school when I was young, so I

was always trying to find a way to make more money on my own so

I was doing stupid stuff like lemonade stands or going to

neighbor houses to try to rake their leaves or anything to make

my own money. I got my first computer when I was in third or

four grade and I started programming when I was, I think,

thirteen years old and just really wanted to make my own game and

websites so I picked up some books from the local book store

and did that in my spare time.

My mom is an entrepreneur so she told me, why not take your

programming skills and make a business out of it and that is

when I first started thinking about building my own company

when I was working on my first company when I was thirteen I

had at least a few hundred customers and all of them were

paying me recurring revenue every single month. I was

selling stuff on eBay and I was selling my programming services.

I made some money, I didn't make big money but enough. I was

making like high five digits.

Jessica went to Berkeley where she studied computer science,

there she met her co-founder Andy Su.

At first we were just doing homework with each other but

after we do our homework we thought why don't we do other

fun things, when we are not doing our homework so we started

brainstorming startup ideas and just programming project ideas

and we started building stuff in our spare time and then that

ultimately led way to us wanting to build a real company together

In college Jessica and Andy started to build what was to

become InDinero. She and her team lived together in a small

apartment in Silicon Valley.

I thought it was so much fun to live in an apartment with my

co-founder and with our early team because you are just. You

are literally eating and sleeping and breathing your

startup 24-7, when you do that and it was just a few of us in a

small tiny room, the living room and we got our computers there

and just wake up, roll out of bed and build our startup and

then we cooked meals and then just went back to working again.

It was a lot of fun. The first version of InDinero was really

bad it was just my co-founder, Andy and I, going to a hackathon

and we had a weekend to build a project and present it to about

a hundred people. We didn't really care about product

quality or anything. We just programmed all weekend

long to build it.

InDinero launched in 2009. She and her team needed more money

to build the product. She initially set out to raise 500

thousand dollars for the company but received so much interest

that she eventually had to turn investors away.

Our launch went really well and I think it went well because we

took our time to build our product and we didn't just

launch it when we felt ready but we knew we were ready because we

demoed it with dozens of entrepreneurs. We saw them sign-up

and we knew which common problems they had so we knew

that it was ready for the public

and then people started offering checks and it all rolled in and

then it was the feeling of optimism and excitement and

finally when we had all the money we decided to spend it

really slowly. We didn't just spend it over night on random

stuff. We were really cautious about it because, I had never

seen that much money in my life and all though it not that much

for a company it was a lot for Andy and I.

I think about the business almost all the time I try to not

think about on Saturday but every other day, I think that if

you are not thinking about your startup then you are not doing a

good enough a job if you are the founder at least. Because

you are going to come up with your best ideas at the most

random moments, when you are driving in your car or thinking

in the shower or just walking to work and so I think you have

to think about it all the time. The Lifestyle is hectic, you

have to be working long hours and you have to be enjoying that

So why are they doing this? Is it about walking away with

millions of dollars? Or is the ultimate goal having satisfied

users and a good product?

I was supposed to be unemployed I was supposed to have no money

And here I am, I'm able to eat, sleep, live under a roof and

have an office. It is already amazing for me so I could live

on sustenance, right, and I couldn't care less.

I think a lot of people, jumps out of them, how wealthy some

tech entrepreneurs get. Look at Bill Gates or Larry and Sergei,

in Oracle, or, you know, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and you

think, it is all about the money but if you ask them, it is

really not. If you talk to those guys who are entrepreneurs,

they are not in it to make big money and it turns out, if you

think about how much you are going to make of money, you

might make money, but it is not really a good indicator. So I

think the primary motivation really is that the best

entrepreneurs try to change the world.

I think that it is always very different and I think it is

sometime very personal too what drives them. I think we have

certain entrepreneurs that really want to change the world

others just realize that this is incredible way to build a lot of

wealth, and others are really just passionate about their

product and are really not thinking about the business

itself. I think too many entrepreneurs are in it for the

wrong reasons. I think they are in it for the money, for the

fame, for the glory, and a lot of them are going to say they

are not in it for any of that but they are just cheating

themselves. The first time entrepreneurs when they first

get funded they at first are really thrilled that they got

funded and then the weight of the money is on their shoulders

and they say, ohh wow, we really got to do this and we are going

to make sure it works because we have now raised money from

somebody else, from other people.

I think that a lot of entrepreneurs are spending their

twenties working all the time because, there are a few different

reasons. One, a lot of them see the opportunity for fame and

success and more than that, the best ones just really have

these great ideas and realize they can do something right now,

it's cheap to do it, you can just come up here and do

something and potentially really alter the way the world works.

I'm not building software to build a business and make

a ton of money and get rich of it.

Leah Culver is the CEO and co-founder of Grove, a real-time

group chat service for teams. She started her first company in

2007, when she co-founded a social network site named Pownce

which a year later got her selected as one of the

"Most Influential Women in Web" by Fast Company.

So I first became interested in programming and sort of doing

little bit more with computers, when I was about fifteen, it was

kind of trendy at the time to make your own webpages and

everyone wanted to have their own homepage so I got one of

these free Angelfire, GeoCity homepages and started to

learn HTML. I wasn't quite sure that that was I wanted to for

a job, I think it was kind of I always thought was really fun

but I actually wanted to be a graphic designer when I was

younger because my mother was a graphic designer and I think it is

easy as a kid to just want to do what your parents do because my

mother always loved her job and I thought that it would be so

cool to love what I was doing.

She graduated from college in 2006 and decided to move to

San Francisco. After graduating from college I really wanted to

move someplace warm because I grew up in Minnesota which is

very cold and I got a job at a start-up in San Jose and I

worked for startups for a little while and then I realized that I

wanted to do my own. I wanted to work on my own projects. That is

why I got into programming because I wanted, you know,

to work on my own things.

Leah needed a new laptop but couldn't afford it. She came up

with a unique way to generate enough money to buy a new one

when she sold ad space on her computer to several companies by

laser-etching their logos on the surface of the computer.

So I said: Buy a space of advertising on this laptop and I

made like a corny webpage for it like, hey if you buy an ad on my

laptop I show it off on all this

San Francisco cafés and things and I didn't actually think that

anyone would pay attention to this stupid website. I did it kind

of as a joke and out of the frustration that I didn't have

enough money and people ended up actually buying ads on it and

paying for these cute little ads and it was fun. It was a lot of

work to get people to buy the ads but I ended up getting

enough money to buy the laptop and etched it and made a video

of it and made the whole thing a production and tried to really

get the most value to the people who actually did buy the ads and

I felt a little bad, you know, somebody have to get something

good out of it but it was a really interesting experience

and probably, like, really good lesson in marketing and sort of

following through on a project.

Leah's first startup began as a hobby when she started playing

around with sending messages and media to her friends. She

got two of her friends involved and they turned it into a social

network. The site got a lot of attention and at some point

invitations to use the service were being sold on eBay.

My first startup was actually Pownce and it is sort of a funny

story because most people will go through several big failed

start-ups or little failed start-ups that no one ever heard

of before they end up making a product that is fairly popular.

Pownce was very popular for a first start-up It is not really

the traditional way that start-ups are built most of the

time you will have some small start-up that don't work out

that well but I was lucky enough to work with Kevin Rose on

Pownce who is fairly well known and ended up getting a lot of

publicity for my first start-up.

Your first startup is really, really exciting. Everything is

a big deal and everything matters and you get T-shirt and

stickers and it is so exciting to have sort of your own startup

A year later the company was struggling due to a lack of

revenue. The team decided to sell Pownce to a software

company called Six Apart. Two weeks later the site

got shut down.

How did it feel to sell the company. It was interesting.

It's kind of exciting because you are like someone wants to

buy my company and it's exciting but at the same time it

is kind of sad because you lose sort of the independence and

freedom to work on the project. They ended up shutting down the

site which I wasn't super happy about so that wasn't a great

experience. Things can go wrong. You can end up blaming people.

You can end up, having a lot of fighting when things aren't

going super well and they never go super well. I don't know why

anybody thinks that startups are rainbows and sunshine. It's a

lot of hard work, I mean if you want rainbow and sunshine work

a 9-5 job and have a hobby on the side because hobbies will

always be rainbow and sunshine cause when they don't work out

you don't want to work on them. I think there is a part of our

generation, my generation where you need to be perfect and good

in everything and part of being an entrepreneur is: You will

fail, you will mess up and do things wrong. I mean even

Pownce, the site got shut down, like, acquired and shut down

because we ran out of money

that is kind of a failure but you need to be able to say that

is okay and move on from that. Or something might not work out

in the way you expect and I think that is hard for a lot of

people to know that they are going to do something wrong.

Failure is a part of the startup culture. In the news we only

hear about the successful companies but what about all

the others. 90% of all start-ups will fail.

You can't have everyone be a success, it's just not a

tenable situation so most start-ups still do fail but the

good news is that when those start-up do fail it is a great

lesson often times for the entrepreneurs and you usually

see a lot of them come back and try again.

What is really important is to make sure that, you know,

I'm not really putting my whole identity in this start-up

and I realize that this might fail.

In our experience about 6 out of 10 out of the investments we make

fail and we lose all our money and maybe 2 out of 10 float

along and maybe we make our money back or maybe two times

our money so really one or two of those ten investments that

make it a huge success that make venture capital worth

pursuing and those are the one or two that make us many, many

times our money.

Yeah, failure is totally accepted here. It is actually

even better if you failed in your profile, people value a lot

that you failed and it's totally okay, I fail every day

in something. Guys who do really well they are guys who have

crashed another company before, and the guys who haven't crashed

another company yet this is the company they need to crash.

I made 30 million dollars when I was 17 and lost it all by the

time I was 20, and that experience really made me

realize that in life the most important thing is the people

around you and it is easy to forget that and get caught up in

the hype. You only get one life. You got to live it.

Don't forget to actually enjoy it.

Ben Way is an English serial entrepreneur. He grew up in

England and was early fascinated with building businesses.

He started a computer consultancy at age 15. At 17 he

had raised 40 million dollars, making him one of the first dot

com millionaires. By twenty he had lost it all.

I was always very different in school. I'm severely dyslexic.

I was told at 9 years old that I would never read or write

because I was pretty useless. I still have trouble spelling

business and entrepreneur is a word I couldn't even possible

hope to spell but I was very lucky and one of the reason

why I got into computers and technology is that I was

actually given a laptop at 9 years old to help me with my

dyslexia and I was one of the first of kids in the whole of UK

to be given a laptop for education.

My first semi proper business was at twelve years old. I

bought some chickens and I sold their eggs and I had a

proper cash flow where I used to look after the fee and check

the sale of the eggs. You know eggs have very good margins

at twelve years old. After my chicken business I started my

first computer consultancy on my 15th birthday, charging 10

pounds an hour and that was really how I started a proper

business. I think at the time I was the youngest company

director in the country and it wasn't until few years later I

raised twenty-five million pounds for what was back then the

first e-commerce search engine.

At 21, after the Dot-com crash in 2000 Ben's company

went bankrupt. When I failed I failed in spectacular fashion.

I lost twenty million pounds. I lost my car, the girl I loved,

my house, I couldn't even buy a tube ticket in the

same day I was in the rich list.

But even after this experience he decided to continue building

businesses. In 2003 he started Rainmakers, an innovation

and venture company.

So after I failed it did take me a while to get back on my feet.

After losing everything, it was very hard time in my life.

I ended up doing a reality TV show and traveling the world.

But entrepreneur is such a deep part of me. It took about

18 months, 2 years, to start my own business again, but never

any second does business leave me. I'm always thinking of

business so even after I failed I was thinking of ideas for new

businesses I could do. Sometimes I wish I could quiet my mind

a bit more often. But every second by every day is consumed by

the thought of making the world a slightly better.

It's been a, you know, a very Long and challenging time. I had

some great successes during that time and great failures also.

I just don't fear the failures so much any more.

Even tough so many companies fail entrepreneurs continue to

start new businesses in the hopes that theirs will be that

one in ten company that succeeds. What does it

take to build a successful start-up?

Successful startups needs a lot of things. They need a great

idea. They need a great team and they need to be there at the

right time and they need the right level of funding

There is a lot of luck in the success of all business that

have succeeded. There were 25 search engines funded before

Google was funded. There were Friendster and Linkedin and

Myspace and about 50 others before Facebook became the

big winner in that area. There is a little bit of luck that

just happens where somebody gets it just right. That could

be skill, that they figured out what the user really, really

wants and that's the thing that makes those big businesses.

Some of it is that you are at the right place at the right

time and you get lucky.

I think with any company there is a lot of luck involved.

You can have great idea and work really hard and be really

smart but the one thing that is out of your control is timing.

Absolutely, team is super important, you know, big market

I don't know, it's magic, it's totally magic, it's all of that

stuff and 9 out of 10 times they fail and the one time it

does work it happens in a totally unexpected way.

Look at Twitter, right, how big was micro blogging when Twitter

started. Look at Facebook, how big was social networking when

that started. Those weren't huge interesting markets but that is

what you hear from all VCs. That is really what we look for in

those investments. These weren't really big investment at the

time. Starting a company often feels like series of miracles

and you have to have one set of really good thing happen right

after the other. So it really does feel like a lot of luck but

at the same time if you really work hard and try a lot of things

and really experimental you can create your own luck.

And you can make these miracles happen.

When I was young I didn't know what a entrepreneur was.

I understood it as a catchall word to define any independent

small business person that is just what I thought but it

sounded pretentious to me.

I can't even pinpoint where it all came from but I just always

had the impression that I was going to invent things.

Zach Klein is a 27 year old entrepreneur. He is the

co-founder of Vimeo, a popular video sharing site, visited by

50 million people each month. He started his career working on

website called College Humor. Two of his friend from college

started to post silly pictures of themselves on the Internet in

1999. Pretty soon the site was getting a thousand visitors

a week and Zach joined them while he was still in college.

I never thought about quitting college. I loved college,

The cliché, I think it was some of the best times of my life.

It was a really nice intersection of innocence and

independence and it was lovely. And I went to school in North

Carolina where I love and would give anything to have four

more years there.

After graduation in 2004 he and his three partners moved

the company to New York.

We were having a hard time taking seriously by anyone in

the industry because we weren't in San Francisco and New York

and I think all of us sort of were attracted to the romance

of moving to New York City so we decided to move there instead

The four friends rented apartment together and ran the

website out of their spare bedroom.

For the first three or four months it was just the four of

us, so we sort of just got out of bed, walked 20 yards over to

our office and just worked until we got tired, and then we put on

clothes and go get dinner. I remember it was a big shock when

we got our first employee and we had to start wearing clothes to

work and having normal business hours.

In 2005 The New Yorker published an article named "The Funny

Boys" about College Humor and the guys behind it.

It certainly made clear that this wasn't fluke. That we were

very ernest business people, very ernest entrepreneurs who

thought very carefully about the things we were making

Within a few months of the article being published they had

a book-deal and a movie in the works.

Our office grew I think until we were like 10 or 12 people,

it stayed in our apartment and then when we could afford it,

we got the next floor above our apartment so we would take an

elevator up the building to our office and I don't remember what

the exactly the count was but I think we had something like 30

people before we had our first person above thirty and we had

to hire that person because we needed an accountant and that

was the youngest accountant we could find.

Vimeo started as a side project by Zach and one of the

co-founders of College Humor Jakob Lodwick. After hours they

built the site and began experimenting with uploading

short videos for their friends.

Vimeo is definitely my proudest work, it is certainly the thing

that I took the most time designing. I actually haven't

had desire to design something since Vimeo.

I remember having an office and having a door and sort of

shutting my self off for six months while I sort of iterated

on this constantly. We weren't very sophisticated making

websites then. We didn't have any best practices.

We didn't know how we should be building the site collectively.

Jake and I still considered very much a personal project

and so he gave me a lot of space and time to make something

I was really proud of. I remember writing letters to my

friends and family saying "I'm sorry, you don't know me

anymore" and that sort of thing because I just sort of let all

of my relationship go because nothing was important as this.

I remember breaking, I broke up with a girlfriend cause I had no

time or interested really, it was really more of an interest

thing. Nothing was exciting to me as this thing. Knowing that

there were tenths of thousands of people using the service and

in love with it and waiting to see what we could do next

In 2006 IAC, a big Internet company, acquired both

College Humor and Vimeo. After being a side project for a time

in 2007 Zach and Jakob got the go-ahead from IAC. Vimeo became

a full-time, fully funded start-up. The website user base

was growing steadily but in 2008 Zach decided to leave the

company. I think what it was there was something,

the entrepreneurial spirit had been sucked out of the company

because we were know own by such a massive company that was

making a lot of decisions for us and I felt myself being squeezed

into this role of just a designer and I didn't really,

I learnt design because that was just the easiest way to make

myself useful to the process of building those companies but I

wanted to learn so much more and I had money for the first

time in my life and I never wanted to work on the Internet

just for the sake of working on the Internet. There were a lot

of things that I wanted to do so I left to do them.

So buying some wood and building cabins with my friends here is

something I wanted to spend time doing so that's what I left to do

Zach now spends most his time living in the woods, without

electricity and unreachable by phone.

I've lived in this cabin behind me for a year, for about half

the year. I spend three or four days of the week down in

New York, cause I'm still involved with Internet, and then

another three or four days I'm here and there is usually,

I don't know, 8 to 10 people with me, just to sort of make

a little place, that we all can spend time doing whatever we

want to do. I came to this place, I think, primarily,

because I love the outdoors, I have always wanted a place like

this but I keep coming back because it is in this place I

feel the most creative recently. My entire career have just been

spent online, pushing pixels around and there is something

novel and thrilling for me to build with wood and stone, with

my friends. To iterate with these materials. To make

physical things we can use, that we can be inside of and

other people look at them. I can't recreate that sense of

pleasure working online. I can't explain it, I don't think it is

permanent. It is just right now this is where I'm most inspired.

The most interesting place to be is the place that allows you to

become very singularly focused and when you are that way you

are really at your peak and I think it is when you are the

most comfortable with your self. I think it when you are the most

attractive to other people that you are bound to be interested

in and you sort of become magnetized. You just find other

people who are also driven to make or to think the same things

and it puts you in a really creative place where there is no

fear. Where people are just really happy about the things

that you are making together and it is in this space that I

think you achieve the greatest things creatively.

Success is what you make of it. I mean I know some of the most

successful entrepreneurs can be unhappy. So I think for me to be

a successful entrepreneur is both having a work and life

balance. You know, I want to be successful but at the same time

I want to live life.

Don't be indirect about how you think. Don't take a job to go

somewhere else. If you want to be in Silicon Valley and you

want to do a start-up, go to Silicon Valley and do a

start-up and don't let anyone stop you because when you get

out here it is a whole new world of all kind of possibilities.

So many people have the wrong idea that they have to follow

some kind of path. Do your MVP. Build your initial prototype and

then pitch it and have a initial customer. It doesn't matter.

Everybody start a company in a different way. If you are to

follow another guy's path you aren't being a true entrepreneur

The most comforting thing to me again was just the fact that all

these people that are on magazine covers, they started

out just like you, in their twenties, with no experience

and they were able to figure things out. That I think should

give comfort to anybody who is excited about starting a company

You can't teach entrepreneurship you either are an entrepreneur

or you're not. I think if you are you're going to end up

doing it and that is just who you are. You can't change that.

As long as you have passion for something and some fundamental

core idea I think that you should just hone in on that and

really do everything you can to explore that.

Follow your heart. Follow the things that really matters to

you. If you do that you will become a big success.

There has never ever been a better time to do it than today.

You know you're only young once. Life is too short to give it up.

If you got the opportunity to do something like this you owe

it to yourself, you owe it to the world, owe it to your

children to take this as far as you can.

Not say you are going to wait until after college or prepare

yourself to become entrepreneur or to take classes even about

entrepreneurship but just to it while you are still taking

classes and to not give any excuses for building a company

because no matter what you could come up with excuses.

The hardest thing is just to start.

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