One of the blogs I subscribe to, The Blog Herald, recently carried a fairly standard story about an company acquisition. In this case, it caught my eye, because it’s Teens in Tech acquiring The Youth Bloggers Network.
The CEO of Teens in Tech is 16-year-old Daniel Brusilovsky, while 15-year-old Patrick DeVivo runs the Youth Bloggers Network. And they’re offering ad revenue split between publishers and host, custom domains, pro accounts, increased storage space etc.
It suddenly reminded of a quote (Thanks to @andjdavies, @neilperkin and @Rtyrie for reminded me of the source where Google failed).
It’s from the recently published and much discussed ‘Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable‘ by Mr Clay Shirky.
One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of “When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”
The point isn’t that 14, 15 and 16 year olds are doing these things, which would suggest it’s solely the preserve of the young – the point is that there is no reason why the very young or old can’t become CEO of their own business. I talked with someone recently whose salesforce is way above the age you’d associate with internet businesses, but who is incredibly effective at what he does. It’s about the attitude, rather than skills, and the reason it’s more prevalent amongst the young is due to the access to technology, and changes in culture, which are more familiar, and not challenged by legacy practices.
Which means you’re not just going to face young rivals, but old rivals, middle-aged rivals, experienced rivals, inexperienced rivals, and your existing competitors.
And, as Mark would say, expert predictions aren’t very reliable, so the only real defence is to have a clear vision and aim on how you’re going to best use new and existing technologies and techniques, and start making yourself different right now.