Daniel invited all of us at Intel Youth to attend the Teens in Tech Conference, so that’s where I spent my Saturday: in the SF Google office with a bunch of kids my sister’s age. Never have I experienced a greater abuse of the Twitter hashtag, especially when the tweets were displayed as a backdrop during breaks and slideless presentations. Not gonna pretend like I didn’t contribute my fair share of inspirational spam either.
As Dave Spark says, sometimes it’s nice to attend a tech conference with an atypical crowd–because it’s refreshing to see new faces (though there was still the Scobelizer, Michael Arrington for a bit, and the Woz). To contemplate what I learned or gained from this conference was a bit challenging, considering that many of the speakers were talking about college life, social media, and design sensibilities…what else was there to extrapolate from besides the “been there, done that…why am I here again as a 21-year-old”?
And in the end, it comes down to Gladwell again: brains that are at least “smart enough” + incredible opportunity & a dash of luck + 10,000 hours of practice = guaranteed success. The earlier you can get the 10,000 hours in, the earlier you’ll become incredible and the more hours you’ll get in your lifetime; and if you’re more than just “smart enough”, a talented genius with interests in a field that’s a trending topic…Woz wants to meet you when you’re bright-eyed, bushy tailed, 100% passion-driven with no rent checks to pay.
Gladwell’s examples of “incredible opportunity”: Bill Gates got unlimited time-share terminal access and started his 10,000++ hours of programming at age thirteen, because The Mother’s Club decided to fund a computer lab in 1968 when most people didn’t even know what a computer was. The year the computer center opened at the University of Michigan, Bill Joy stumbled in at age 16–by accident. (That computer lab also happened to be one of the most advanced in the world.) Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got free spare computer parts from Bill Hewlett to tinker with in high school, when others had to pay premiums for computers. (During a lecture at Haas, Woz mentioned how he would also collect computer manuals, so instead of having a mentor, he had parts + manuals + many hours of “practice”/fun in the garage.)
Gladwell’s example of “birthdate luck”: “If you were more than a few years out of college in 1975, then you belonged to the old paradigm. You had just bought a house. You’re married. A baby is on the way. You’re in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit. So let’s rule out all those born before, say, 1952. At the same time, though, you don’t want to be too young. You really want to get in on the ground floor, right in 1975, and you can’t do that if you’re still in high school. So let’s also rule out anyone born after, say, 1958. The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you missed it. Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one, which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955.” Paul Allen: January 1953. Steve Ballmer: March 1956. Bill Joy: November 1954. Steve Jobs: February 1955. Eric Schmidt: April 1955. Bill Gates: October 1955. You get the point.
Teens in Tech attendees’ examples of “incredible opportunity”: Let’s start with Daniel. At Intel, Teresa asked him how he got started in tech. His answer went something like, “When I was thirteen, I hung out in my dad’s office all the time, and one day, one guy working there was sort of drunk and he joked that he should just give me a job since I was always there. That night I asked my dad to help me write a resume and the next day, I asked the guy for the job he said he should give me. He had no choice but to give me something to do!” His brief stint with TechCrunch was also pretty good luck (and any kind of press is good publicity), considering that he’s only 17. If we look at the speakers panel, Adam (also 17) gets to work alongside Gary Vaynerchuk, someone who has a seven-figure book deal thanks to his superb grasp on personal branding and marketing. That’s an incredible mentor to have. Danny was picked up by Digg at age 17, Vitor works at Twitter, Joey has worked at Google, Yahoo, Revision3…and more.
The opportunity given to the “social media generation” is this: we can market ourselves effectively and efficiently without spending anything other than time. Only a few years ago, you had to pay to build a website (unless we’re talking Geocities and Homestead, which was only popular among my friends in 7th grade for ~ShOuTouTs & QuOtEs~), you had to pay some more to print portfolios, business cards, brochures, fliers…and you were a nobody until maybe college when you started making “professional friends”. Post-college if you were antisocial and a straight-up nerd. Now with Coroflot, Behance, Flickr, Wordpress, Tumblr—you name it—you can easily have your own portfolio or website, and then market yourself and make friends with people in your field via Twitter. After a few private DMs (or not), you’re now “professional” LinkedIn friends and people are recommending and referring you left and right, if your work is good enough. Other incredible opportunities include 1. the endless amount of tech conferences where you get to meet influential people IRL and 2. venture firms like Y Combinator, which give the baby startups a real chance. Living in the Bay Area would be a third opportunity.
As for “birthdate luck”, you only have to be young enough to have all the time in the world to spend all day on the internet and old enough not to befriend spammers and confuse posts with pages or tags with categories. Heck, you can be 11-year-old Max Swisher who has his own blog, podcast, YouTube channel, and even business card. You don’t have to be a genius, but it wouldn’t hurt to be one either. Kevin introduced his Stanford buddy, Suril, as “the guy who has his own wiki page“…who passed the Sun Java exam at age 10. As for my friends who have their own startups, they’re young enough to not have to worry about family and sleep, though most have at least finished college (for time and serious dedication more so than credibility and maturity…though those all factor in).
If I did have to guess an average for this conference crowd though, I’d say 17. I gifted my sister her own domain & hosting for her 17th birthday today. [Read on…]
