{"id":28,"date":"2018-06-14T19:04:17","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch01-2\/"},"modified":"2026-02-14T17:36:01","modified_gmt":"2026-02-14T17:36:01","slug":"ch01-2","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/bus3060\/chapter\/ch01-2\/","title":{"raw":"1.2 It\u2019s Your Revolution","rendered":"1.2 It\u2019s Your Revolution"},"content":{"raw":"
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Young Bill Gates appears in a New Mexico traffic mug shot. Microsoft\u2019s early roots trace back to New Mexico, where Gates and Paul Allen moved to work near Altair. Bill Gates mugshot<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

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\r\n\r\nLearning Objectives<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAfter studying this section you should be able to do the following:\r\n
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  1. Name firms across hardware, software, and Internet businesses that were founded by people in their twenties (or younger).<\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\nThe intersection where technology and business meet is both terrifying and exhilarating. But if you\u2019re 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\u2019s abundantly clear that many of the world\u2019s most successful technology firms\u2014organizations that have had tremendous impact on consumers and businesses across industries\u2014were created by young people. Consider just a few:\r\n\r\nBill Gates was an undergraduate when he left college to found Microsoft\u2014a firm that would eventually become the world\u2019s largest software firm and catapult Gates to the top of the Forbes list of world\u2019s wealthiest people (enabling him to also become the most generous philanthropist of our time).\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook as a nineteen-year-old college sophomore.<\/p>\r\n

    Steve Jobs was just twenty-one when he founded Apple.<\/p>\r\n

    Tony Hsieh proved his entrepreneurial chops when, at twenty-four, he sold LinkExchange to Microsoft for over a quarter of a billion dollars (Chafkin, 2009). He\u2019d later serve as CEO of Zappos, eventually selling that firm to Amazon for $900 million (Lacy, 2009).<\/p>\r\n

    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.<\/p>\r\n

    If you want to go a little older, Kevin Rose of Digg and Steve Chen and Chad Hurley of YouTube were all in their late twenties when they launched their firms. Jeff Bezos hadn\u2019t yet reached thirty when he began working on what would eventually become Amazon.<\/p>\r\n

    Of course, those folks would seem downright ancient to Catherine Cook, who founded MyYearbook.com, a firm that at one point grew to become the third most popular social network in the United States. Cook started the firm when she was a sophomore\u2014in high school.<\/p>\r\n

    But you don\u2019t have to build a successful firm to have an impact as a tech revolutionary. Shawn Fanning\u2019s Napster, widely criticized as a piracy playground, was written when he was just nineteen. Fanning\u2019s code was the first significant salvo in the tech-fueled revolution that brought about an upending of the entire music industry. Finland\u2019s Linus Torvals 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.<\/p>\r\n

    BusinessWeek<\/em> regularly runs a list of America\u2019s Best Young Entrepreneurs\u2014the top twenty-five aged twenty-five and under. Inc.<\/em> magazine\u2019s list of the Coolest Young Entrepreneurs is subtitled the \u201c30 under 30\u201d (Fenn, 2009). While not exclusively filled with the ranks of tech start-ups, both of these lists are nonetheless dominated with technology entrepreneurs. Whenever you see young people on the cover of a business magazine, it\u2019s almost certainly because they\u2019ve 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\u2019d best get cracking with technology, quick. Junior might be on the way to either eat your lunch or be your next boss.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

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    Key Takeaways<\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/header>\r\n

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