"♪" "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 HM 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."