5 Inspirational Young Internet Entrepreneurs

Abdul Qowi Bastian

The Internet presents an array of opportunities for brilliant minds to attain success at a young age. In a vast industry with many possibilities, the World Wide Web can earn you not only fame, but most important, money. In a digital era like today’s, age doesn’t matter anymore. Anyone can become an entrepreneur on the Internet.

The following young entrepreneurs have dedicated their lives to their Internet businesses. Anyone who has seen David Fincher’s “The Social Network” knows how Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, worked day and night to get his business going. Regardless of its controversial story, the film offered viewers a glimpse of how the Harvard dropout built the No. 1 social networking site from scratch.

Here is a list of young Internet entrepreneurs below the age of 30 (note that Mark Zuckerberg is not on the list because I assume everybody knows his success story). Some names are familiar, some are maybe unknown to the general public. But their success stories and perseverance should serve as motivation for young people who want to follow these great thinkers.

David Karp (born 1986), founder of Tumblr
The then 21-year-old Karp founded Tumblr in 2007 out of his bedroom in his mother’s apartment in New York City. “I was holed up in the middle of this world where it was just me on the Internet,” Karp told the Guardian. Tumblr’s net worth is now $40 million.

Tumblr, a free-blogging platform and hosting service, enables its users to curate photos, videos and audio clips and reflag other people’s content on users’ blogs.

Matt Mullenweg (born 1984), founder of WordPress
Mullenweg used to do consulting and went to school in Houston before moving to San Francisco where he worked at CNET Networks. After quitting his job at CNet in 2005, he founded a company called Automattic, the secret force behind WordPress.com.

WordPress is the most famous blogging platform in the world. Its wide usage is due to its ease of use.

Noah Everett (born 1984), founder of TwitPic
The home-schooled Everett graduated high school at age 15. He taught himself computer programming and Web development simply because he was too young to start college. Having previously experienced business failures, he had an idea, originally for his friends, to share photos via Twitter.

TwitPic allows users to easily post pictures to Twitter. It is often used by citizen journalists to upload and distribute images in real-time as events take place around the world.

Dustin Moskovitz (born 1984), co-founder of Facebook
Moskovitz co-founded Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin  and Chris Hughes. Although he earned a lot from Facebook, he has also worked on other ventures. In 2008 he left Facebook and now owns a fresh mobile photo-sharing site named Path. He also started a new company called Asana, a Web application designed for business communication.

Asana is a shared task list for a business team. It’s the place to plan, organize and stay in sync with your efforts.

Naveen Selvadurai (born 1981), founder of Foursquare
Selvadurai, born in Tamil Nadu, India, had previously worked at big-name companies such as Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems before he founded Foursquare in 2009. Foursquare is now valued at $80 million.

Foursquare is a location-based social networking Web site that allows users to highlight and navigate locations in any city. By using it, people can “check in” and gain points.