Doing Apps and Start-Ups While Still in High School

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Like many young entrepreneurs here in Silicon Valley, Matthew Slipper knows that success does not come easy. His first start-up, an online education venture, flopped. His second, a video-sharing app for the iPhone, has sold only 20 copies.
But Mr. Slipper is optimistic. He should be. He’s just 18, a founding member of the Paly Entrepreneurs Club, an extracurricular group at the local high school that sprang into existence last September — the brainchild of about a dozen students committed to inventing the future.

“I want to build something that is tied to what is happening next,” he said.
While budding moguls in high school clubs like the Future Business Leaders of America invest make-believe money in the stock market or study the principles of accounting, the Entrepreneurs Club members have a distinctly Silicon Valley flavor: they want to create start-ups.

They have met weekly during the school year to discuss their ventures and ideas, explore matters like money-raising strategies and new markets, and host guest speakers. Once, they held a Skype chat with a software engineer in Sweden who described the intricacies of running an online music business.

Founding a company in high school is “a great opportunity,” said Vincent Gurle, 18. Later in life, “if you fail at business you might have to go live with your parents,” he said. “But we’re already doing that.”

Mr. Gurle, who will attend the University of California, Santa Cruz in the fall, started a business last year aimed at supplying students to companies as software testers. It sputtered when he could not find enough companies interested in buying the service. He counts the effort a success anyway, he told the club at a recent meeting, figuring that the people he met will remember him when he returns with his next idea.

Now he is learning how to program for Microsoft’s new mobile operating system.

Club members have been working on projects like a social network to help teenagers quickly organize study groups and a trading network for Bitcoin, a virtual currency. They have brainstormed ideas for mobile geolocation games and new kinds of grocery store scanners.

At a recent meeting, about a dozen boys gathered in an empty economics classroom at Palo Alto High, known as Paly. The demographic somewhat reflects Silicon Valley, too; there were no girls, though all the boys say they wish some would join their club.

There also were few laptops or even tablets in the room, befitting a post-PC world. All the boys had their work on paper or smartphones. They passed these around to show off their latest concepts.

Mr. Slipper, who plans to attend the University of California, Santa Barbara in January after a stint in R.O.T.C. boot camp, demonstrated his video-sharing app, speaking quickly so as to leave time for everyone to talk about their ideas before the lunch bell rang.

“The syntax wasn’t hard,” he said, explaining the coding involved. “Objective C in the iOS framework took me about two weeks to learn. I’ve modeled the business on Instagram, leveraging speed and ease of loading.” Sympathetic young heads nodded.

“How will you protect your intellectual property?” asked Aaron Bajor, 18, one of the group’s founders. He was waiting to discuss a diagram of his own project, a social network for entrepreneurs entering college.

“Someone can always copy your idea, but that will be half-baked,” Mr. Slipper said confidently. “It’s not theirs.”

James Maa, another club founder, was up next to discuss his project, the study group social network.

“We’re not out in public yet,” he said, apologetically. Mr. Maa, 18, plans to study computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in the fall. His social life, which included attending many events for start-ups, had gotten in the way of building the network, which he calls Bubble.

Not everyone had a project to present, and that was acceptable.
“The goal here is inspirational,” said Mr. Bajor, who is headed to the University of Southern California to study entrepreneurship. “A great idea can hit you any time. Even if you do not have a great idea yet, if you have capabilities and passion others will want you on their team.”

Not every would-be tech titan at Paly belongs to the club. Some were distracted by college applications and plans for the prom. Or other things. “There are probably a half-dozen other kids who should be in this club,” Mr. Bajor said, but they just didn’t have time. “They are too busy starting their own companies.”

Start-up fever for these students is something they breathe in the air, or learn at home, with parents who work in the tech industry. Fern Mandelbaum, a partner at the venture capital firm Monitor Ventures, and a parent at the school, attended a club meeting to explain how her business works.

The students in the club were not the only beneficiaries of Ms. Mandelbaum’s advice: Her daughter, Skylar Dorosin, started and for several years ran a summer camp. Ms. Dorosin, 17, is heading to Stanford in the fall, and has turned the camp over to her 11-year-old brother, Miles Dorosin.

“The kids here have such an unfair advantage,” said Aaron Levie, 27, the chief executive of a data storage company, Box, referring to students throughout the Valley. He recently spoke during Science Week at another local high school, nearby Los Altos High. “In Seattle we had lots of computers, but we never had venture capitalists drop by.”

At his talk in Los Altos, he had this advice.

“I told them to make friends and leverage their four years of freedom,” he said. “If you look at Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, you see that lots of foundational things can happen among high school friends.” Like those other companies, he said, Box, valued at about $350 million, was built by several high school friends.

Deborah Whitson, a Paly economics teacher who is the club’s faculty adviser, said that in recent years she had noticed a shift in the kinds of projects that interest business-minded students. “In the ‘olden days’ we’d have a few jewelry designers or dog walkers among the students,” she said. “The Internet started to change that. In the past five years, things have boomed because of the iPhone.”

Ms. Whitson worries that the club may not survive without its enthusiastic leaders. Mr. Bajor, however, said his brother, who just finished his sophomore year, is eager to pursue his own start-up dreams.

Another sophomore, 15-year-old Max Bernstein, helped the club recruit some speakers this year, but had to drop out of meetings because of time conflicts with the robotics club. Next year, though, he said he would have more time for the Entrepreneurs Club. He won’t have to take gym class.