By most measures, Will Manidis is like many other American high school students. He plays lacrosse for Westtown, his Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia. He’s captain of Westtown’s robotics team, which has deepened his interest in math and computer science. Last fall, in the heat of the election, he helped organize debate nights.
Such activities are great material for college applications. When he enrolled at Westtown, Manidis figured he’d wind up at Harvard or Princeton, maybe go on to earn a Ph.D. and do cutting-edge research.
“I was going to be that dude behind a keyboard that never talked to anyone,” he recalls.
Over a year ago, though, those plans started to change, after many hours of working closely with two fellow members of the robotics team, Roger Balcells Sanchez and Rachel Coe. Balcells had recently lost his grandmother to Parkinson’s disease. Instead of programming robots to defeat other teams’ robots in games, they thought, what if the three of them used their knowledge of algorithms and technology for something more meaningful? Could they help Parkinson’s patients live longer, richer lives?
They set out to develop a smartphone app that provides Parkinson’s patients with feedback on what activities make them feel better. Manidis now often uses recess for quick calls to medical doctors or tech experts. He sometimes schedules business meetings in the school’s science building. And he occasionally relies on his mom to drive him to connect with venture capital firms. The company, TrackYourDisease, is hoping to raise $150,000 from investors.
He says his parents are supportive but “a little weirded out that I’m running a business full-time while in school. The world they grew up in is very different than the world I’m becoming an adult in.”
There’s no guarantee Manidis and his partners will succeed, of course. Most businesses fail, even those whose founders aren’t constrained by classes and curfews. But their example demonstrates that the spirit of entrepreneurship remains alive among today’s youth. There are no firm numbers on teenage startups, but research suggests that people in their 20s and early 30s are slightly less likely to become entrepreneurs than they were 20 years ago. Some companies that have grown into household names were founded by teenagers, including Dell, Subway, IKEA, and Facebook.
George Orwell observed that “each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” Complaints about today’s teenagers are legion: that they are self-absorbed and selfie-obsessed, spending hours a day Snapchatting and Instagramming on their phones to the detriment of real relationships with friends and family. Generation Z, the post-millennial generation, is the first born in the era of widespread Internet availability. That steady stream of access to technology has clear downsides. But for entrepreneurial-minded young people, it also comes with significant advantages—in addition to the natural enthusiasm, idealism, and can-do attitude of youth. In some ways, the environment for teenagers starting businesses is more favorable than in the past, and many are taking advantage. Who knows what great advances of tomorrow are being developed by young entrepreneurs today?
“This is the first generation that has grown up without gatekeepers,” says Rich Sedmak, founder of Schoolyard Ventures, a suburban Philadelphia company that helps high school students launch businesses. “It used to be if you had an idea, you had to go to venture capitalists to tell you if it’s a good idea or not. So many of the industries that were ruled by gatekeepers aren’t ruled by gatekeepers anymore. So many things that were hurdles in the past aren’t hurdles to this generation.”
Nowadays, young entrepreneurs can glean business advice from blogs and Internet message boards. They can crowdfund for seed money or get paired with investors on specialty websites. They can network on their phones and find out about and enter the growing number of business competitions. They can watch other people’s startup ideas get picked apart on TV shows like Shark Tank.
The types of businesses most common among young entrepreneurs, Sedmak says, include mobile app development, social media marketing, and apparel- or food-based businesses. He’s worked with high school students who have founded companies that roast coffee, make organic bone broth, and sell a liquid repellent spray that keeps clothes from getting dirty. Starting businesses while in high school is not just a half-baked, calculated effort to burnish college applications, either. Some of these companies are making big money and providing an early foray into the business world for a generation that expects to change jobs repeatedly over the course of a career.
With many teens overscheduled, finding time to work on their businesses is often the biggest obstacle. Kotaro Kojima, 15, and his younger brother Kei, 14, of Medina, Ohio, have black belts in karate and practice two hours a day for their youth orchestra. That leaves little time to work on their invention, AcoustiGlass: eyeglasses for the deaf that sense sounds and relay them above the lenses with flashing LED lights.
Inspiration struck the brothers three years ago, when at a summer family camp in Tennessee they were playing basketball with a group of deaf teens. A horn sounded for everybody to move to the next activity, but the deaf teens didn’t react until they saw everybody else moving.
“That really alerted us to it, to the challenges they face every day,” Kotaro says. “To have an opportunity to make a difference in deaf people’s lives, it’s really amazing.” The brothers developed a business plan, started writing software to recognize sounds such as sirens and alarms, programmed LED lights to blink, and applied for a patent. In early April, they won the $11,000 first-place prize in the business concept category of the Diamond Challenge for High School Entrepreneurs, an international competition held at the University of Delaware.
There’s plenty of other support emerging for young entrepreneurs, too. The investment firm Blackstone is pouring money into a program called LaunchPad that works with college-age entrepreneurs. Tech investor Peter Thiel’s charitable foundation has started a two-year fellowship program in lieu of college for aspiring business leaders aged 22 and under.
“There’s more money than ever flowing into this space,” says Justin Lafazan, a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania who cofounded the Next Gen Summit, an annual conference for young entrepreneurs.
As for Manidis, he has traded his Ivy League impulses for what he calls his “dream school”: Olin College, a small, collaborative engineering school outside Boston, where he will start in the fall. He plans to keep working on TrackYourDisease but says he has more big ideas in him. When young entrepreneurs meet, he enthuses, everybody is encouraged by the infectious idealism of youth: “We are all dissatisfied with the world we were born into in a fundamental way. And we are all foolish enough to think we are able to do something about that. We haven’t been broken. We’re not cynical yet. We’re developing something to try to change the world, which is incredibly exciting.”
Tony Mecia is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
