From 2005: Four young internet entrepreneurs

one way to increase your net worth is to use the internet for all it's worth everywhere you look computer savvy people are doing just that many of them astonishingly young our cover story is reported now by david pogue of the new york times remember that old new yorker cartoon on the internet nobody knows you're a dog but in the real world some of the internet's most influential and successful forces have their own version of that line on the internet nobody knows you're a teenager i started netscape when i was 14 basically had an internship there meet blake ross by the ripe old age of 19 he had co-written a new web browser called firefox it's so good 50 million people installed it in its first six months and it stole 10 percent of the market away from microsoft's browser internet explorer we want you to start up the web browser and be able to surf the web without worrying about spyware without worrying about viruses without worrying about papa bed firefox is free but 21 year old mark zuckerberg turned his little web experiment into a very big business it's called the facebook. com and it's like no college directory you've ever seen for example you can take a person and look them up and you can get a picture of how they'd like to portray themselves in addition to say the courses that they're taking sports teams clubs that they're a part of and who their friends are at the school but i think that there's a lot of times where people just go out meet someone say okay i don't know that much about this person then they'll go back to their room and do what people call facebook them which is going on the facebook and look them up just to kind of see the snapshot of what they have in less than one year the facebook. com has become an addictive part of everyday college life we've gone from having around 150 000 people in the fall to right around 3 million now so it's pretty cool but not as cool as this 13 million dollars of investment capital we get a lot of feedback saying like how much people love the site i get a couple of marriage proposals each day three three two robin liss is a junior at tufts university she runs camcorderinfo.

com the internet's number one source of camcorder information and reviews she posted her first article online when she was 10. i was playing around with my mom's huge panasonic vhs camcorder making claymation videos i wrote an article on how to make a video for under 100 and like 70 people read it and i was like whoa this is the coolest thing ever her audience is slightly bigger today camcorderinfo. com is the largest camcorder review publication in the united states online or off we reach about 300 000 people every single month finally meet wayne chang he's the creator of i2 hub a super high-speed communications network that lets college students across the country collaborate and share computer files in march over 8 million hours were spent on i2hub by students across the nation about 1800 schools have requested to join the network four internet pioneers each of whom began changing the face of online business and culture when most teenagers were just happy to get their driver's licenses how did they do it rule number one get an early start at the age of seven i got my first computer when i two hubs wayne chang immigrated from taiwan he could barely speak english and the fact that i had a language limitation at the time prohibited me from basically making friends easily so that means i had a lot of time on the computer and at the age of 11 i got my first job with a corporation in california i got my first computer when i was i guess around sixth grade within weeks of getting i was like all right i want to learn how to program this is pretty sweet rule number two exploit the anonymity of the internet between email and the phone and a website no one has to know how old i am and what it allowed me to do i think is develop credibility based on our product alone i think the internet is really the great equalizer it really levels the playing field it doesn't matter if it came from a 50 year old experienced software developer in redmond we came from a 19 year old kid in california if it's good software people will use it so there's nothing stopping people dustin just launched 100 schools a couple of days ago so he's passed out but rule number three get good help dude what's up dude you're on tv for the facebook's mark zuckerberg that would be his harvard roommate dustin so he kind of took it on himself to learn programming and so he went home for the weekend came back and was like alright i'm ready to go blake ross led a slightly bigger team for firefox tens of thousands of volunteers working together as part of what's called the open source movement and basically what this means is that people in europe can be coordinating with people in the united states can be coordinating with people in africa all putting the user input into this browser they can submit actual code to improve the product it's really a global effort rule number four exploit your youth the way that i can be unique is by kind of just being creative and kind of reveling and being young and just being a little crazy so for example there's this feature called poking where you just go to someone's profile and you could poke the person and like what does that do nothing it sends them a message it's like you've been poked you know like who cares you know i mean it's like i thought about it when i was drunk or something and like people really like poking each other for some reason that you know i don't think anyone can really explain and finally rule number five be willing to make some sacrifices how much time do you actually get to spend in this bed uh i get i get something like five or six hours a night i generally try to have breakfast and then go to sleep and wake up around noon if you give up social life for the time to work and then you go to bed at two and you wake up four hours later to go back to school i think the thing i sacrifice more than anything else is sleep i didn't sleep much either and my girlfriend is no longer my girlfriend so what drives these young geniuses to sacrifice so much sometimes it's money now i read in an interview where you have a goal become a millionaire by 26 how's that going uh it's going actually pretty well um the actual goal is 24.

yeah i missed class did he get sometimes it's the chance to learn while the consequences are still small yeah you can write on whatever you want do you have the assignment there's no assignment i'm not an expert at anything i mean i'm only 20. so i think what it's allowed me to do is really kind of take a educational approach to the whole thing and grow and sometimes it's the chance to change the world i'm not making a dime off firefox but it's enough for me to get an email from a grandfather in mississippi telling me that he can finally get on the web and communicate you know with his grandchildren in the short term three of these four whiz kids have taken leaves of absence from college to fast track their projects but where will they be in the long term mark zuckerberg will probably be right where he is now the bigger it gets the more people we get to interact with and that's really cool too wayne chang's i2hub project has grown so big that it's created a problem students are using his high-speed network to swap movies and music the recording industry is worried so is the motion pictures industry they've sued about 405 students but he says he has a solution it's still secret at this point but he says it could change the landscape even more profoundly what we'll do will solve the problem of lawsuits basically the entertainment industry as a whole will be very happy and so with the students so this is our office robin liss has launched a second website called digitalcamerainfo.