YOUNG, RICH AND RESTLESS

Success comes to those who wait, they say, as it involves long and hard work as well as the ability to endure pain. But the following young people are special. They have not only radically changed the way the world communicates, they are making serious amounts of money at a very young age.


While not all of us can join the list of the most influential people in the world, one thing we can learn from them is that they all started with one simple step.

1. Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The two co-founders of Google launched their search engine on Sept. 4, 1998 from a garage. At that time, Larry was 25 and Sergey 24 years old.

The search engine soon gained popularity, especially among research students.

In a couple of years, Google grew quickly and reaped billions of US dollars in profits.

The success story of Page and Brin inventing the world's number one search engine has inspired young people around the world, especially those interested in developing information technology tools.

2. Jerry Yang and David Filo

Yang was 26 and Filo 28 when they invented the search engine Yahoo! in 1995. The Stanford University students started the online directory as a side activity, but the traffic to their Stanford-hosted Website doubled in the first month alone, frustrating the site's administrators, so the duo decided to dedicate all their time running Yahoo! as a full-time business.

Yahoo! quickly grew into a Web portal, acquiring other companies and search engines to expand its range of services.

It went public the following year and raised US$33.8 million by selling 2.6 million shares.

Last year, giant software company Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billon but later cancelled.

3. Steve Shih Chen, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley

The three co-founders of video-sharing site YouTube all started off as employees of the online commerce service PayPal.

Taiwan-born Chen and German national Karim studied Computer Science together at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, while Hurley studied design at Indiana University in Pennsylvania.

When they launched YouTube in 2005, Chen was 27, Hurley 28 and Karim 26.

Chen and Hurley developed the idea after they experienced difficulties sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Steve's apartment in San Fransisco.

The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the Zoo, and shows Karim at San Diego Zoo.

An estimated 20 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and around three quarters of the material comes from outside the United States.

In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion.

4. Matt Mullenweg

Born in Houston, the US, on Nov. 1, 1984, Mullenweg is the co-founding developer behind the open source WordPress blogging platform and its founding company Automatic.

Also an adviser to Sphere and WeGame, Mullenweg started his business when he was 19. His creation quickly become a hit among bloggers because the site was easy to access and update. As of last year, the blogging platform totaled 230 million regular hits with 6.5 billion accessible pages. In addition, there is an average of 4 million new postings every month.

Mullenweg who visited Jakarta last January once said he would never sell WordPress because he was not seeking to make a profit.

5. Tom Anderson

Tom Anderson co-founded MySpace, along with Chris DeWolfe and Cody Olson in Salem,

Oregon, in 2003. Born in Nov. 8, 1970, in Los Angeles, California, Tom is now a strategic adviser for MySpace.

Because newly created MySpace accounts include Tom as a default "friend", he has become known as the goofy, the default picture of MySpace. As of 2009, Tom's profile had more than 200 million friends.

It is currently one of the most popular social networking websites in the United States.

MySpace's popularity stems from the functionality it offers with regards to music. When free audio streaming was launched in Sept. 25, 2008, MySpace users downloaded billions of songs in just a few days. The facility made many people believe MySpace could change the music industry on the Web.

6. Blake Aaron Ross

The prodigy created his first Website at the age of 10. Born in Miami, Florida, on June 12, 1985, he began programming while still in middle school.

He enrolled at Stanford University in 2003 where he developed a year later the Mozilla Web browser. He later combined it with Firefox program he developed with Dave Hyatt.

Ross and Hyatt envisioned a smaller, easy to use browser that soon gained momentum and popularity.

Released in November 2004, when Ross was 19, the Web browser quickly grabbed market share with 100 million downloads in less than a year.

In 2005, he was nominated for Wired magazine's top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year, opposite Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jon Stewart. He was also a part of the Rolling Stone magazine's 2005 hot list. He is the author of Firefox for Dummies, published in 2006.

7. Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar released the online commerce platform eBay on September 1995 at the age of 28.

Born in Paris, France, on June 21, 1967, Pierre moved with his family to Maryland when his physician father was posted to the John Hopkins University Medical Center.

Having graduated from Tufts University in 1988 with a degree in Computer Science, Omidyar and his friends developed an Internet shopping service named eShop Inc.

The service was later sold to Microsoft, but Omidyar remained fascinated by the technical challenges of online commerce. He was intrigued by the technical problems stemming from establishing an online venue for the direct person-to-person auction of collectible items.

He created a simple prototype on his personal web page, and launched an online service called Auction Web in 1995. The business exploded as people began to register trade goods of an unimaginable variety. Business expanded through word of mouth, and Auction Web added a Feedback Forum, allowing buyers and sellers to rate each other for honesty and reliability.

Omidyar changed the company's name to eBay in 1997. By the time it went public in 1998, the site had more than a million registered users. In 2003, eBay enjoyed sales of over US$2 billion.

He endowed the Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund with $100 million. The fund, to be administered by the board of trustees of Tufts University, will invest in international microfinance initiatives designed to empower people in developing countries to lift them out of poverty.

8. Mark Zuckerberg

Born in May 14, 1984, Zuckerberg was 19 when he created the online social website Facebook with his fellow computer science major students as well as roommates Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes at Harvard University, in the U.S.

He launched what he called a "Harvard-Thing" from his dorm room on Feb. 4, 2004 and decided later to spread Facebook to other schools and the public.

Now Facebook is the second biggest social networking site after MySpace, and keeps growing by the day. Millions of users are signing up every month.

Zuckerberg serves as Facebook's CEO and has been the subject of controversy for the origins of his business and his wealth. - JP

Source : http://www.thejakartapost.com/