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Please go here
to learn how to enter the contest. BUT HURRY! The contest ends November 1st.Abandon dvdrip
Mark Bao is a parallel entrepreneur who has founded 11 companies and 2 non-profit start-ups. What’s more amazing is the fact that he’s only 17 years old and still attends high school. Mark has some big plans for the future and you can’t accuse him of thinking small. I have to say personally, Mark has been one of my inspirations in the past year or so(Made me ask myself, “why can’t I do that?”).
First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a technology entrepreneur, currently 17 and attending my senior year of high school (finally!). I’ve founded 11 companies and 2 nonprofits. Currently, I am the CEO of Avecora, Co-Founder of Ramamia, Co-Founder of TickrTalk, CEO of Classleaf, Founder of Adaptance Advertising, and CEO of Atomplan. I am also the Founder of The Ramamia Foundation and the Co-Founder of EveryoneGive.
In the past, I’ve done a number of exits, the most recent being Atomplan being acquired by Branchr Advertising in late August, see the TechCrunch article here.
I was recently listed in TechCrunch’s Ten Teen Entrepreneurs To Watch: Click here to see it
This is something I ask a lot of people who have the life/business split. I know business is hard, especially when school is added to the equation. How do you manage your time? How do you decide what’s important?
As a prerequisite to this question: I do all of the design and programming of all of my associated businesses, and they are all bootstrapped (except for TickrTalk which has received a small bit of university funding from the University of Pennsylvania Weiss Tech House Fund, where my co-founder Harish Venkatesan attends, and which recently hired a developer.) In addition to this, I do also work on the business as well, in the cases that I do have a co-founder.
This is always a tough question. Over three years of intense amounts of entrepreneurship and business, I’ve developed a very strict work ethic with regard to business work. I try not to waste any time at all and make meaning out of every hour. It’s quite tough but quite rewarding. And very, very stressful. It’s not exactly for the faint of heart, but as Dharmesh Shah said, thinking about starting a startup? You have a genetic defect! 
Dharmesh: “Thinking of a startup? You have a genetic defect that’s going to make you miserable for the rest of your life.”
1:14 PM Oct 12th from web
Mark, you’ve founded and co-founded 8 web start-us which include Avecora, Ramamia, TickrTalk, Classleaf and you’ve written and sold several FaceBook apps, which really took off! Avecora OnDemand has just been acquired by Branchr Advertising. And on top of that you’ve spoken at Gnomedex in 2008! You’ve accomplished a LOT in only two years! What do you intend to do next? What’s the next step?
Thanks Clinton! Appreciate the compliments, it warms my heart. My next step is a full launch of Ramamia which will be coming in the next few weeks. In the long term, I do plan on attending college, and am currently working on college apps and SATs (argh). I’ll also working on Avecora which is predicted to launch sometime 2013. However, I’d also like to keep going with all of my startups, as well as delve into philanthropy. Please see a few questions down for my full explanation.
You’ve talked about going to college. It’s a great opportunity to meet new people and experience college life. But how do you personally view formal education? Does it help you in your business life? What is your goal for college?
College for me is something I expect an extraordinary experience from. There are three reasons: I want a business education that puts me up to speed with business knowledge in my less experienced areas (accounting, etc. — everyone has something to say about the use of an undergraduate business education, but there’s merit to it.) Second, college is a once-in-a-lifetime social experience that I won’t have the opportunity to experience in the future. Lastly, networking and
the alumni community are very important.
There are few reasons for a person fresh out of high school to skip college. I currently run all my startups while doing high school side-by-side, and I plan to continue that in college. If things get out of balance in one way or another, then a new decision will be made, but pre-emptive strike in the form of “screw this I’m going to skip college” will not be the best decision to make.
If you are a high school person that thinks they can do better without college, please at least entertain the idea for a few months. I can’t say this can cover every person’s case, but please try college!
I know it’s difficult to think years into the future, especially at a young age. And we don’t need a crystal ball to know that you have a bright future.:) But at the age of 17, what are your plans for 5, 10, 15 years down the road?
Five years down, Avecora development should be well underway. In ten, Avecora should be released. I plan on continuing starting businesses and performing philanthropy.
In the future, I will venture further in the non-profit and philanthropy area, an extremely important facet of my life. I’ve decided that if I’m reasonably wealthy at some point, I will be donating at least 25%, and most likely 50% of that wealth to humanitarian efforts in reducing poverty and hunger worldwide, providing education, and general charitable actions; scientific research in the area of biotechnology, cancer and disease research, neurology, and astronomy; philosophical, psychological and sociological study; and promoting the interests of social entrepreneurship and ethical business. At this point, I’ll also most likely make angel investments in startups as well, but that’s quite the aspiration, isn’t it?
How have you stretched personally since starting your first business. What are personal challenges you feel you still need to face?
Yeah. Financing and fund raising is always a problem and a hurdle to clear. All of my businesses have been bootstrapped (except for TickrTalk which has a very small university tech grant), though Avecora will be raising money at some point, it seems.
Personal challenges? I have a weblog article coming up entitled “How Computers and Entrepreneurship Screwed Up My Life (And It’s My Own Damn Fault)” that talks about the personal pros and cons of going into entrepreneurship. There’s definitely something to be said about personal challenges: I have fantastic friends and I’m very happy for that, but socially I’ve been quite lacking. I mentioned balance earlier: that’s extremely hard to find, since the entrepreneur mindset (or the probably-unhealthy “Mark Bao mindset”) that ‘time not working is wasted not working,’ — in other words, work now, enjoy later, but work your ass off now.
But it never ends. Personal challenges include school, SATs, and college admissions; plus the aspect of socializing, which I believe I missed the memo on. I got the one about business networking, though.
There’s lots of great books out there, some times it’s had to know which ones to read. What kind of books would you recommend young entrepreneurs read to increase their business knowledge and people skills?
Oh, man, here we go.
- Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. I cannot say enough good things about this book. It is a fantastic ‘view from the shoulder of’ the life and times of extremely famous and successful entrepreneurs. Get in the mind of successful founders through this amazing compilation of interviews Jessica performed. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Seriously, go get this on Amazon.
Clinton, I’m going to email you a coupon to gift Founders at Work to a reader of this interview, because it’s such a damn good book. Please give it away to one of them.
- Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. A very inspirational book from a pretty prolific member of the startup community about the basics and framework of starting companies. Really great book, a must-read for all entrepreneurs.
- Three books by young entrepreneurs: Zero to One Million
by Ryan Allis, My Start Up Life by Ben Casnocha, and The Dream by Gurbaksh Chahal. Three inspirational books by three extremely smart Generation Y entrepreneurs. Gurbaksh specifically made it big, early, and twice, and the story of what he did with his first fortune, and what he did, is great.
- Paul Graham’s essays, available at http://paulgraham.com – some of the best writing about entrepreneurship and lessons learned about entrepreneurship. If you don’t already know who Paul Graham is, wtf? — He’s an extremely prominent startup figure associated with seed funding firm Y Combinator along with Jessica Livingston.
- Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters by Jerry Porras et al. Quality book about creating lasting meaning from your own success.
- What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World
by Tina Seelig, who is the director of entrepreneurship at the Stanford School of Engineering. Great book about, well, what the title says.
- The Google Story by David A. Vise: a history of Google’s comings and beings. The story behind Google is astounding.
- The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar takes you inside the life of a bit of a renegade angel investor and teaches you a lot about entrepreneurship. It was recommended to me by my co-founder at Ramamia, Jason L. Baptiste.
- Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Good book about success and the strange things it may stem from.
Lots more that I can’t think of at the moment, too.
Is there anyone in particular who inspires you?
There are quite a few. Sir Richard Branson is a successful entrepreneur with the Virgin brand, who also obviously knows about the impact of giving back. The same can be said about Bill Gates. The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are some of the most important innovators in the 21st century (throw 1998-1999 in there for good historical accuracy.) Elon Musk is a guy who killed it: co-founded PayPal and revolutionized payment on the web. He doesn’t do the standard webapp startup again, no no—he starts to revolutionize space and automobiles. Damn, two of the hardest eggs to crack, and he takes them on with astounding success (SpaceX landed a NASA contract; everyone knows about Tesla Motors.) Paul Graham is very inspirational with Y Combinator and his essays. There’s a lot more.
What advice would you give to Gen-Y entrepreneurs that are having a hard time breaking into their business or haven’t quite achieved anything outstanding just yet, but have a big dream and KNOW that they are just around the corner to achieving something BIG, but don’t quite know how to get there?
Start now with the minimum that you can. Something you can do now is better than nothing done later. Exercise: for seven full days, find out as many pain points in your life or someone else’s life(preferably yours, though – first hand is best) that you can solve. Problems that can be solved through the use of technology or something else relating to innovation. Do some research and market analysis on those ideas. Find a great one? Execute well on it.
Everyone repeats it and it bears repeating: don’t be afraid of sharing your idea. I’ve shared what people would call “million/billion dollar ideas” and nobody has beat me to the punch to it yet, because (and this is so repeated but so important) EXECUTION IS KEY. Execute well and don’t care about whatever and whoever feels like “stealing” that idea, because if you’re the right person that deserves that success, you’ll be the one that gets it.
Cheers my friend, thanks for this great interview! Hope it helps everyone. Please feel free to email me at mark@markbao.com or give me a call at 617.395.5633 – no apology for disturbing my work, as I am always extremely happy to meet new people.
(Yes, you can put my number publicly on your article!)
Mark
Thank you for the interview Mark. Now I know why you’re one of the 10 Entrepreneurs to watch this year. You definitely inspire a lot of people your age, and people older than you for that matter. It was really a pleasure you have you on this blog.
An American Haunting divx
You can learn more about Mark at MarkBao.com or follow him on Twitter.
Is it a sign of greed to HAVE more than others?
A lot of us go through life thinking that our wealth marks someone else’s poverty. That if we make more money than the average Joe, we’re actually taking from the average people who work hard to put food on the table and support their families.
Why is this scarcity mentality so dangerous and irrational? If we don’t receive anything of value it means we haven’t given, at least most of the time this is what it means. We point at large firms that make a killing, ripping people out of their hard earned money, and use them as an example. This is why we shouldn’t be rich, because rich people are extortionists!
The Way We Were trailer Al’s Lads video Right? I don’t think so. I firmly wealth is important, more important than a nice car or nice house or fame or keeping up with the Joneses. Wealth can be used in the wrong way, to take advantage of people, exercise control or destroy. It can also be used to create jobs, to build new technology, feed the hungry, build bigger cities and improve our standard of living in countless ways.
You can use a gun to kill your next door neighbor or to hunt for food. Whether it be money, knowledge, time, water, organ tissue or blood. No matter how you look at it, you can’t give something you don’t have.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 film
I admire David King for his enthusiasm, his creativity and his willingness to try out everything. He says he has been most places in the internet business world and has never given up even when things turned ugly. His story is somewhat the same to the rest of us who have started business. He quite his day job to do something he felt was better worth his time. He has now decided to give back through his blog and through his experiences.
“I have really been productive lately in my business and I want to share a little method that I use to keep my productivity up and to get much more done in a day than I ever used to in several days.
“The more you get done quicker the faster good things come to you!
“There are so many benefits to being productive it’s actually pretty ridiculous! I don’t need to try to convince you that:
‘You might want to be productive in life’
“If I do need to convince you of that then this blog isn’t for you. There are so many advantages to being productive in life as a whole and it’s great to see how my life is molding and shaping because of my productive work and consistent hunger and determination to get more done faster.
“I have learned a couple techniques that I want to share with you because I think they can help you and your business move forward faster as well.
“Out of all the books, courses and content that I have consumed on productivity i would say that these are the most important one’s to keep on track…
One of the biggest keys to my productivity is writing down what i need to do for that day. I simply open notepad or wordpad and type a task on each line. One of a big name marketers does this and I liked the idea so I picked it up from them. By writing what you need to get done for that day down you make a mental note of what YOU need to do today. I personally write everything down in the morning then delete things as i complete them so it get’s me anxious to finish so that i can enjoy the rest of my day either making more progress or relaxing.
Your Cell phone, skype, google chat, twitter, facebook chat are all distractions! Turn them off or have a busy or invisible status. This is still tough for me to do because i connect with a lot of people and love building relationships. But when you are working work and don’t be distracted by social media and what’s going on with your friends or family unless it’s important! (obviously)
“To sum up this post there are a couple real important points. The first one is take care of your body, it’s really the only one you will ever have and you have got to take care of your body and treat it as it were… well your only one! The next thing is create habits of writing down what you need to do and create habits to get rid of distractions and focus on working on something until completion.
“Take these things that I have learned and Apply them! (I didn’t write this post for myself)
“The notepad trick works real well too! try it out! That’s it for 7 secrets to amazing productivity, I hope that you got a lot out of it and at least took some mental notes!
Please re-tweet this so that your followers can benefit from it as well!
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David King – DavidBeKing.com Lady with Red Hair move
“My name is David King and I’m the Creator of “wtc method, BMIM blog, faft principle” I am a self proclaimed “Internet Business King” and a Social Media Junkie! I’m 20 years old and I work full-time from home. Blogging and playing around on social media sites!”
To learn more about David check out his bio and follow him on Twitter as well.
We share life experiences and discuss development of leadership skills, discovering better methods of growth in business, the innovation of modern technology, social media and the web.
