Raising Entrepreneurs

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“It is not the brightest who succeed,” Malcolm Gladwell writes in his new book, Outliers. “Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates’s high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end. By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer.

At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates says. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.” Gates’s talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so.

“We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that 13-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur,” he writes at the end. “But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one 13-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

Read the full book review in The New York Times.

Alexander Niles and his guitar.

Alexander Niles, 14, a high school freshman in Miami with dreams of making it big as a musician, is young to be focused on making a living. But he has already become an entrepreneur.

It all began by accident, he said. He was late in handing in his choices for elective classes and landed in a course on business. For an assignment to write a business plan, he turned to his passion, guitars, and decided to create a business building custom guitars for other people, something he had already done for himself.

After refining his idea in class, Mr. Niles entered his business plan into a local competition sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship and captured the grand prize for South Florida, which allowed him to compete in a national competition in New York this fall.

The price for his guitars starts at about $2,000, and he expects to make a profit of around $700 a guitar. So far, he has made four, including one for a former instructor, Alex Fox, a flamenco guitarist who has endorsed Mr. Niles’s company. Mr. Niles has set up a Web site, but he does not plan to start filling orders until he has lined up other endorsements, finished his YouTube video and started establishing his brand through an advertising campaign.

Though Mr. Niles has years of school ahead of him, he said he planned to tend to both his music and his business along the way.

Read the full story in The New York Times.

When Jessica Cervantes, the 18-year-old entrepreneur behind Popsy Cakes, needed to make a promotional video, she recruited her 10-year-old cousin Natalie to star in the commercial.

Natalie, after all, was the target market for Jessica’s frosted cupcakes on an edible cookie stick — and she was cute to boot.

Jessica turned the camera on her cousin and told Natalie to take just one bite of a Popsy Cake, then smile and look at the camera. It didn’t work. Natalie wouldn’t stop eating the Popsy Cakes, and it took a baker’s dozen takes to get it shot right.

EATING THE PROFITS

When it was over, Natalie had consumed 10 Popsy Cakes, which sell for $3 each. ‘I told her, `Stop. You’re making me lose profit,’ ” Jessica recalls.

But that was hardly a major setback for the budding Popsy Cake enterprise. In October Jessica won first place at the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge in New York City. Now, with $10,000 in prize money to help expand her business, she hopes there is a country with kids who are as hungry for Popsy Cakes as Natalie was.

Jessica invented Popsy Cakes while taking an NFTE class at John A. Ferguson High School, where she is a senior enrolled in the school’s business academy curriculum. In 11th grade, she took ”Introduction to Entrepreneurship,” one of several courses NFTE sponsors in high schools around the country.

When asked to come up with a product as homework, Jessica came up with Popsy Cakes. ”I’ve always liked to do baking, and I’ve always wanted to own my own business,” she says.

After doing some research about kids’ snacks online, she learned that the most common complaints were that they were sticky and messy. That was her inspiration for her cupcakes on a stick.

Over the past year and a half she’s refined the idea. “One of the biggest obstacles I faced was making the product. It sounded easy, but at first the cake tasted horrible. Then the cookie sticks would break.”

Today Jessica makes an assortment of themed Popsy Cakes, including versions for Halloween and birthdays, and sells them for $30 a dozen.

Read the full story in the Miami Herald.

Technology has helped breed this new generation of givers and social entrepreneurs. The Web facilitates global communication and network-building as well as ease in donating.

Talia Leman, an Iowa teen, got her feet wet in philanthropy after Hurricane Katrina. At age 10, she started a project called TLC – trick or treat for the levee catastrophe. She wrote a news release on lined paper and sent it to TV stations, urging kids to ask for loose change on Halloween as well as candy. With the help of an adult friend who set up a website, she connected with children in 4,000 school districts across the United States. They raised $10 million, what ABC News said was equal to the giving power of the top five US corporations.

That experience led Talia to create RandomKid, which supports children in the US and elsewhere in carrying out their own project ideas. “When I speak at schools, kids often come up and say, ‘I have this great idea. How can I make it happen?’ ” says Talia, the nonprofit’s CEO. RandomKid has worked with children in 50 states and 20 countries.

Last month, they held an Internet video conference involving schools in five states with the South African entrepreneur who developed the “playpump” system to provide safe water to rural communities. The students had raised enough funds for their second pump. Hearing that, “entrepreneur Trevor Field said he knew of a community in Malawi that desperately needed one, and he’d get moving on it right away,” says Anne Ginther, RandomKid’s president.

On Nov. 13, Talia was recognized for her efforts with an award from World of Children (WOC), which sponsors what some call the Nobel prize for children.

“Talia is being recognized as a changemaker because she has put together a new cohort of philanthropists – some 600 kids across the US and the world,” says Harry Leibowitz, WOC founder. “What she’s doing has sustainability.”

Source: CS Monitor

Katie Simon works on a Minga banner

The very rich and the very famous capture the headlines for their charitable giving. But another group of avid philanthropists is also leaving its mark. Young people from grade school on are engaged as never before in making a direct difference in the world. They are donating via the Internet to favorite projects overseas, creating their own nonprofits to pursue social causes, and becoming grantmakers on foundation boards to foster change in their home communities.

“It has become a value for young people to be personally involved,” says Claire Gaudiani of the Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising at New York University. “Many have seen first-hand where the needs are and what a difference individual citizens can make.”

Some youths have gained that awareness from volunteer activities. Many have seen celebrities take up worthy causes. Others have traveled with their families and encountered the challenges many children face in other countries.

Katie Simon, a teenager from Newton, Mass., says a lengthy family trip in the developing world when she was in second grade first opened her eyes. Then, when she heard two years ago about the child sex trade in some of those places, she knew she needed to do something.

“I learned about a rehabilitation center for children in the Philippines and talked with friends about raising $5,000 in a yard sale,” says the 16-year-old. “People thought that was impossible, but we raised $6,500!”

Thrilled with their success, Katie founded an organization, Minga (mingagroup.org), to educate others about the scourge of child sex trafficking and to raise funds to fight it. (Minga is a word in Quechua, a native language of South America, which means “the coming together of a community to work for a common good.”)

So far, Minga has raised $40,000, the rehab center has been completed, and the group is working with other partners in Guatemala, Thailand, and Boston.

Katie spends between 20 and 30 hours a week in the work, and says it’s well worth it: “I’ve discovered my own power to change the world, and have connected to some awesome people. I’ve seen the good side of everybody – it’s amazing.”

Last month, Katie won a Global Action Award given to young leaders by the international relief group Mercy Corps.