They keep getting younger
If you were already depressed about having passed the peak years of entrepreneurial success, a 13 year old chief executive and Valley startup founder won't provide any consolation . Mark Coker at Venture Beat introduces the diminutive entrepreneur, Anshul Samar of Elementeo, who is courting venture capitalists at TieCON 2007 in Santa Clara under the banner of "The New Face of Entrepreneurship."
A year younger than Aaron Swartz when he helped co-create RSS 1.0, Anshul Samar is not a web technology builder, college dropout, and cultural iconoclast likely to lose his luster in the valley. He is pure businessman with a vision ("We inject fun into education") with the acumen and charisma of a Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison. (I have no need or interest in his product, a role-playing board game aimed at improving Chemistry education, but Samar makes me believe he can sell it and be successful.) He is confident and comfortable discussing angels, seed rounds, and his plans to generate his first million in revenue before "the end of middle school." Unlike many young entrepreneurs, he has no plans of leaving school, but we'll see how he feels about that if and when he achieves his business goals.