Enfantrepreneurs: All grown up
The tech boom spawned its fair share of characters, among them the teenage overachievers who ran their own companies and occasionally ran themselves into the ground. Those days are over. But the "enfantrepreneur" pushes on
Courtesy The Globe & Mail
by André Mayer
With Scott Colbourne
Friday, September 26, 2003 - The Globe & Mail
That was then
They're the sort of kids most parents covet, with their cherubic, beaming faces and accomplishments that fill us with pangs of inadequacy. Business loves its mascots, and none so much as that textbook model of overachievement, the enfantrepreneur.
The cult of the kid capitalist emerged during the internet boom years. If you could write a program, it scarcely mattered if you were of drinking age. It seemed that, every week, the media uncovered yet another ingénue with an innovative notion-digital or otherwise-and the will to execute it. There was Vancouver teen Joely Miller, the inventor and marketer of an extreme bicycle; there was Seattle's Nicholas Ravagni, who, at 11, created a device that helped people learn to play guitar.
There was also Michael Furdyk of Toronto. In 1999, at age 17, Furdyk and two friends sold their company, Mydesktop.com -- a web site intended to better inform users about their computers -- to Connecticut-based Internet.com for $1 million (U.S.). After that little item hit the news wires, in Furdyk's words, "everything exploded."
"We were on Canada AM and we got back to our office and had 20 calls, from every media outlet," he recounts. "We had six or seven camera crews wait in line to do interviews with us."
For CBC's The National, Furdyk conducted the interview in his rented office on a plastic patio table bought at Wal-Mart. ...