By Henry Grosso – High School Intern
As a high school student beginning to think about my future in the workforce, it is always fascinating to learn about others my age who have already achieved success following their passions. I have taken some time to look into a few successful tech startups created by people my age. All of these tech startups began as small ideas from the brains of young adults who eventually transformed these ideas into big successful companies. There are 3 tech startups that really stood out to me when doing my research and it is not because of how successful they were, it is because of how creative and different they are from most.
Sanil Chawla – Hack+
Sanil Chawla was a sophomore in high school when he wanted to launch a web development startup as a way to “monetize his hobby”. Sanil was researching ways to lower the barrier to entrepreneurship and zeroed in on fiscal sponsorship. Sanil could not find anyone to back him financially and soon put this to an end. Sanil developed software to automate all paperwork and made a scalable version of fiscal sponsorship. He created Hack+, which is a nonprofit that provides sponsorship to student-founded charitable organizations. He has gained support from major companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. He raised millions to help support students like himself pursue their dreams of taking their organizations to the next level. He even landed himself a spot in the Forbes ’30 under 30′ feature!
Being a teen myself, Sanil not only has shown me what it means to pursue his dream, but he showed the youth how with hard work and determination, you can take your business to the next level no matter what your age is with the right resources. Innovative entrepreneurs like Sanil are the definition of a startup with a lot of hope but not a lot of resources. But with Sanil’s organization, he is able to give kids like myself the ability to do what they want.
Sage Khanuja and Nikolas Loanno – Spira to Galileo
Two young men by the names Sage Khanuja and Nikolas Loanno started a telemedicine startup called Spira to Galileo, a New York based healthcare company. They built a backend, no-code tool, which makes it easy to create digital “smart forms” that utilize machine learning algorithms to enhance patient screening, and adapt to patients over time. Khanuja and Loanno met after they both enrolled at the University of Washington as early students after 10th grade. They said they saw a lot of inefficiency and said that “if you’re a patient, before the doctor visits, there’s so much information that can be captured and synthesized to make the doctor’s visit more effective”. The boys released a SMS Covid-19 tracker. Their company’s main idea is that smart forms are another way to interface with patients.
Sage and Nikloas are two very influential individuals when it comes to inspiring the youth and anyone trying to expose their ideas to the public. They showed how when issues are well executed and solved people really begin to listen to your ideas and perspective. They inspire people like me to fix some of the smallest issues that really do have a great impact. It is people like Sage and Nikolas who are dominating the world because of their intellect and ideas that slowly improve the world.
Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little – WordPress
Matt Mullenweg loved blogging when he was 18 years old until his favorite platform was shut down and he wanted to create his own platform to continue pursuing his passion. In 2003, he and Mike Little created and launched the first version of WordPress. WordPress now powers 39.6% of the internet. WordPress is a content management system that allows you to basically host and build your own websites. It contains plugin architecture and a template system so you can customize a website that best fits your liking and business.
Matt is the definition of someone who wants to inspire others around him. By creating a platform to create something custom to your own ideas and thoughts, WordPress gives kids like myself the opportunity to expose their ideas to the world and internet by creating their own web pages. Every company starts somewhere and often that begins with a website where people can read about you and Matt gave people that opportunity if they did not have access to other resources to further spread your name and brand.
After reading about these tech startups, my opinion towards what is possible at such a young age has changed drastically. The future holds so much potential, and the possibilities seem unlimited after reading about what some kids my age have done so early on in their careers.