This is another motivating story about a guy who started a business at a very young age. The more I read such stories, the more I think that the ways of getting rich are endless. The most difficult part of the process is probably getting started. But there are plenty of ways for this, too… This dude started by breeding reptiles in his bedroom 🙂 and eventually switched to developing websites. I don’t exactly know what the common thing between these activities is, but one thing is for sure – a good entrepreneur can make a profit from anything. See the amazing story of Nat Turner, originally published at https://money.cnn.com.
A year ago, at the age of 24, Nat Turner sold his company, Invite Media, to Google for more than $70 million. The idea that made him a multimillionaire was a new technology for online advertising. But Turner had always been an entrepreneur. At a young age, he created a reptile breeding business out of his bedroom.
“I kept snakes and a few pets. That ended up blossoming. I ended up having 400 snakes in my bedroom. And then I started building websites. So I got asked to build a website for one of my snake clients.”
After learning to build a website, Turner started expanding his clientele. His next company was a web design company. Turner also created a business around collecting baseball and basketball cards and traveling around the world to sell them at conferences.
Turner eventually wound up attending the University of Pennsylvania, and it was there that he hatched the idea that became Invite Media.
Of course, many of Turner’s fellow twentysomethings haven’t been so fortunate. With the unemployment rate higher than average for younger folks, many would say the chances of building a successful company at a young age are few and far between. But Turner disagrees. He says it’s a great time to have a good idea.
“I honestly think people who are younger have a much bigger advantage,” he said. “They also have a lot more insight into what people like – Facebook couldn’t have been invented by someone that was 50 years old.”
Turner says building a technology company during a downturn in the economy gave him an advantage. “The best time to start a company is when no one else is, in my opinion,” he said, “When there’s a recession, it means people aren’t innovating.” The recession also created a demand for his advertising venture.
“The economy crashing actually helped us,” he said. “Our clients were more concerned with the performance of their online advertising.”
Chris Dixon, CEO of online recommendation site Hunch and an early investor in Turner’s company, says many of the engineers that would normally take Wall Street jobs started to think outside the box.
“Once the crash happened, I think people did a lot of souls searching and thought about different paths,” he said. “We’ve seen a pretty big migration over into the technology world on the East Coast.”
Although the job sector is still polarized, Dixon says the tech sector is a bright spot in the economy.
“The technology world is actually doing very well both from an economic point of view. it’s one of the U.S.’s best exports.”
This article is one great example of how one can benefit from bad economic conditions. It’s interesting that entrepreneurs usually don’t care about recessions. They even take advantage of bad economic conditions and turn them into success. And this is proved by the fact, that some of the most successful companies, like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Ford, and Microsoft, were started during some of the biggest recessions in history.
To see the original article, please go here: https://money.cnn.com/2011/05/19/technology/nat_turner_millionaire/index.htm
Check some other cool startup articles:
Cameron Johnson – The 9 Year Old Entrepreneur Who Became A Teenage Millionaire
Ephren Taylor – How a Teenage Entrepreneur Made Several Millions Online
Annie Safoian Started A 60 Million Company Thanks To Google – SADA Systems’ Story
Christian Owens – How to Make a Million Dollars at 16
How Teenager Nick D’Aloisio Made 30 Million At 17 – The Summly App’s Story
Top Social Networks For 2013
How to Make a Million Dollars Fast with a Website
Emil Motycka – a Cool Story of a 13 Years Old Entrepreneur
