1.2 It’s Your Revolution

The intersection where technology and business meet is both terrifying and exhilarating. But if you’re under the age of thirty, realize that this is your space. While the fortunes of any individual or firm rise and fall over time, it’s abundantly clear that many of the world’s most successful technology firms—organizations that have had tremendous impact on consumers and businesses across industries—were created by young people. Consider just a few:

Bill Gates was an undergraduate when he left college to found Microsoft—a firm that would eventually become the world’s largest software firm and catapult Gates to the top of the Forbes list of world’s wealthiest people (enabling him to also become the most generous philanthropist of our time).

Michael Dell was just a sophomore when he began building computers in his dorm room at the University of Texas. His firm would one day claim the top spot among PC manufacturers worldwide.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a nineteen-year-old college sophomore.

Steve Jobs was just twenty-one when he founded Apple.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both twenty-something doctoral students at Stanford University when they founded Google. So were Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo! All would become billionaires.

Kevin Systrom was twenty-six when he founded the photo-sharing service Instagram. In just eighteen months, his thirteen-person startup garnered 35 million users worldwide, including 5 million Android users in just a single week, and was sold to Facebook for a cool $1 billion. Systrom’s take was $400 million. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel dropped out of college to focus on his new firm. By age twenty-four he was running a firm valued at over $15 billion with a personal net worth of over $1.5 billion. Tony Hsieh proved his entrepreneurial chops when, at twenty-four, he sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for over a quarter of a billion dollars. He’d later serve as CEO of Zappos, eventually selling that firm to Amazon for $900 million.

Steve Chen and Chad Hurley of YouTube were in their late twenties when they launched their firms. Jeff Bezos hadn’t yet reached thirty when he began working on what would eventually become Amazon. The founders of Dropbox, Box, and Spotify were all under thirty when they founded businesses that would go on to be worth billions. Irish nationals Patrick Collison and younger brother John sold their first company for $5 million. Patrick was just 21 when he and John co-founded Stripe, a payments firm now valued at $95 billion, making it the most valuable startup in the United States. The founders of Rent the Runway, Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss, were in their twenties and still in grad school when they launched the firm that is recasting how millions of consumers engage with high-end designer apparel and accessories. Whitney Wolfe Herd founded Bumble when she was twenty-five; less than seven years later her firm went public with a valuation of about $7 billion. And just a few years out of undergrad, dancer and fitness enthusiast Payal Kadakia launched ClassPass, a service allowing customers to take fitness classes from multiple providers. In 2019, The New York Times estimated the firm was valued at over $600 million, more than the firm behind the New York, Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia Sports Clubs.

Alex Rodrigues—the Canadian roboticist, not the former baseball player—founded the autonomous trucking firm Embark when he was just 20 years old. His firm has since raised multiple rounds of funding from the world's most elite venture firms, and has partnered with several companies, including Ryder, Electrolux, and Budweiser parent InBev, to test the firm's long-haul computer-driven trucking systems. David Karp was another early bloomer. Karp wasn’t just another college dropout; he actually quit high school for self-paced, tech-focused home schooling. It was a good move: He was taking meetings with venture capitalists at twenty, went on to found what would become one of the world’s most visited websites, and sold that website, Tumblr, to Yahoo! for $1.1 billion at an age when he was younger than most MBA students. Another young home schooler, Palmer Luckey, started “modding” video game controllers at age fifteen, founded Oculus as a teenager, and sold it to Facebook for $2 billion (that’s two Instagrams) by age twenty-one, and all before his company had even shipped its first consumer product. In another brilliant sign of the times, Luckey jump-started his effort not by gaining investment from angel investors or venture capitalists, who would demand an ownership stake in his business, but from a Kickstarter campaign. Hoping to raise $250,000, Luckey’s Oculus Rift campaign actually raised over $2.4 million without giving up a single share of equity.

Your author has also seen many former students build thriving businesses they started in their early twenties. These include Nick Rellas, the co-founder and first CEO of Drizly, which sold to Uber for over $1 billion; Bill Clerico, co-founder of WePay, which sold to Chase for $400 million; Andrew Chang, who co-founded blockchain firm Paxos, now valued at $2.4 billion; and Andrew Boni, who leads the marketing tech firm Iterable he co-founded, and which is now valued at over $2 billion. Rellas founded his firm while still an undergraduate; Clerico, after spending the year after graduation as an investment banker; and both Chang and Boni were still in their early twenties when he founded their respective firms. Dozens of other former students of mine have created thriving tech businesses. First-hand experience shows what can be accomplished by bright, dedicated, hard working young people.

This trend will almost certainly accelerate. We’re in a golden age of tech entrepreneurship where ideas can be vetted and tested online, and funding crowdsourced, Kickstarter-style; “the cloud” means a startup can rent the computing resources one previously had to buy at great expense; app stores give code jockeys immediate, nearly zero-cost distribution to a potential market of hundreds of millions of people worldwide; and social media done right can virally spread awareness of a firm with nary a dime of conventional ad spending. Crafting a breakout hit is tough, but the jackpot can be immense.

But you don’t have to build a successful firm to have an impact as a tech revolutionary. Shawn Fanning’s Napster, widely criticized as a piracy playground, was written when he was just nineteen. Fanning’s code was the first significant salvo in the tech-fueled revolution that brought about an upending of the entire music industry. Finland’s Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of the Linux operating system when he was just twenty-one. Today Linux has grown to be the most influential component of the open source arsenal, powering everything from cell phones to supercomputers.

TechCrunch crows that Internet entrepreneurs are like pro athletes—“they peak around [age] 25.” Bloomberg Businessweek regularly runs a list of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs—the top twenty-five aged twenty-five and under. Inc. magazine’s list of the Coolest Young Entrepreneurs is subtitled the “30 under 30.” While not exclusively filled with the ranks of tech startups, both of these lists are nonetheless dominated with technology entrepreneurs. Whenever you see young people on the cover of a business magazine, it’s almost certainly because they’ve done something groundbreaking with technology. The generals and foot soldiers of the technology revolution are filled with the ranks of the young, some not even old enough to legally have a beer. For the old-timers reading this, all is not lost, but you’d best get cracking with technology, quick. Junior might be on the way to either eat your lunch or be your next boss.