From 2005: Four young internet entrepreneurs

One way to increase your net worth is to use the internet for all it's worth. Everywhere you look, computer savvy people are doing just that, many of them astonishingly young. Our cover story is reported now by David Pogue of the New York Times.

Remember that old New Yorker cartoon, "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog?" But in the real world, some of the internet's most influential and successful forces have their own version of that line: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a teenager."

I started Netscape when I was 14. Basically, I had an internship there. Meet Blake Ross. By the ripe old age of 19, he had co-written a new web browser called Firefox. It's so good, 50 million people installed it in its first six months, and it stole 10 percent of the market away from Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer.

"We want you to start up the web browser and be able to surf the web without worrying about spyware, without worrying about viruses, without worrying about Papa Bear." Firefox is free. But 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg turned his little web experiment into a very big business. It's called Thefacebook.com, and it's like no college directory you've ever seen. For example, you can take a person and look them up, and you can get a picture of how they'd like to portray themselves, in addition to, say, the courses that they're taking, sports teams, clubs that they're a part of, and who their friends are at the school.

"But I think that there's a lot of times where people just go out, meet someone, say, okay, I don't know that much about this person. Then they'll go back to their room and do what people call 'facebooking' them, which is going on Thefacebook and looking them up just to kind of see the snapshot of what they have." In less than one year, Thefacebook.com has become an addictive part of everyday college life.

"We've gone from having around 150,000 people in the fall to right around 3 million now, so it's pretty cool." But not as cool as this: "13 million dollars of investment capital." We get a lot of feedback saying how much people love the site. "I get a couple of marriage proposals each day."

Robin Liss is a junior at Tufts University. She runs CamcorderInfo.com, the internet's number one source of camcorder information and reviews. She posted her first article online when she was 10.

"I was playing around with my mom's huge Panasonic VHS camcorder making claymation videos. I wrote an article on how to make a video for under 100, and like 70 people read it, and I was like, whoa, this is the coolest thing ever." Her audience is slightly bigger today. CamcorderInfo.com is the largest camcorder review publication in the United States, online or off.

"We reach about 300,000 people every single month." Finally, meet Wayne Chang. He's the creator of i2hub, a super high-speed communications network that lets college students across the country collaborate and share computer files. In March, over 8 million hours were spent on i2hub by students across the nation. About 1800 schools have requested to join the network.

Four internet pioneers, each of whom began changing the face of online business and culture when most teenagers were just happy to get their driver's licenses. How did they do it?

Rule number one: Get an early start. At the age of seven, I got my first computer. When i2hub's Wayne Chang immigrated from Taiwan, he could barely speak English. "The fact that I had a language limitation at the time prohibited me from basically making friends easily, so that means I had a lot of time on the computer."

"And at the age of 11, I got my first job with a corporation in California. I got my first computer when I was, I guess, around sixth grade. Within weeks of getting it, I was like, all right, I want to learn how to program. This is pretty sweet."

Rule number two: Exploit the anonymity of the internet. "Between email and the phone and a website, no one has to know how old I am. And what it allowed me to do, I think, is develop credibility based on our product alone. I think the internet is really the great equalizer. It really levels the playing field. It doesn't matter if it came from a 50-year-old experienced software developer in Redmond or a 19-year-old kid in California. If it's good software, people will use it. So there's nothing stopping people."

"Dustin just launched 100 schools a couple of days ago, so he's passed out." But rule number three: Get good help. "Dude, what's up? Dude, you're on TV!" For TheFacebook's Mark Zuckerberg, that would be his Harvard roommate, Dustin. "So he kind of took it on himself to learn programming, and so he went home for the weekend, came back and was like, alright, I'm ready to go."

Blake Ross led a slightly bigger team for Firefox, tens of thousands of volunteers working together as part of what's called the open source movement. "And basically what this means is that people in Europe can be coordinating with people in the United States, can be coordinating with people in Africa, all putting the user input into this browser. They can submit actual code to improve the product. It's really a global effort."

Rule number four: Exploit your youth. "The way that I can be unique is by kind of just being creative and kind of reveling in being young and just being a little crazy." So, for example, there's this feature called poking where you just go to someone's profile and you could poke the person. "What does that do? Nothing. It sends them a message, it's like you've been poked. You know, like, who cares? I mean, it's like I thought about it when I was drunk or something, and like people really like poking each other for some reason that, you know, I don't think anyone can really explain."

And finally, rule number five: Be willing to make some sacrifices. "How much time do you actually get to spend in this bed?" "I get something like five or six hours a night. I generally try to have breakfast and then go to sleep and wake up around noon."

"If you give up social life for the time to work, and then you go to bed at two and you wake up four hours later to go back to school, I think the thing I sacrifice more than anything else is sleep. I didn't sleep much either, and my girlfriend is no longer my girlfriend."

So what drives these young geniuses to sacrifice so much? Sometimes it's money. "Now, I read in an interview where you have a goal to become a millionaire by 26. How's that going?" "It's going actually pretty well. The actual goal is 24. Yeah, I missed class."

Sometimes it's the chance to learn while the consequences are still small. "Yeah, you can write on whatever you want. Do you have the assignment?" "There's no assignment. I'm not an expert at anything. I mean, I'm only 20. So I think what it's allowed me to do is really kind of take an educational approach to the whole thing and grow."

And sometimes it's the chance to change the world. "I'm not making a dime off Firefox, but it's enough for me to get an email from a grandfather in Mississippi telling me that he can finally get on the web and communicate, you know, with his grandchildren."

In the short term, three of these four whiz kids have taken leaves of absence from college to fast track their projects. But where will they be in the long term? Mark Zuckerberg will probably be right where he is now. "The bigger it gets, the more people we get to interact with, and that's really cool too."

Wayne Chang's i2hub project has grown so big that it's created a problem. Students are using his high-speed network to swap movies and music. "The recording industry is worried, so is the motion pictures industry. They've sued about 405 students. But he says he has a solution. It's still secret at this point, but he says it could change the landscape even more profoundly."

"What we'll do will solve the problem of lawsuits. Basically, the entertainment industry as a whole will be very happy, and so with the students."

"So this is our office." Robin Liss has launched a second website called DigitalCameraInfo.com, and she plans to launch similar sites for printers and cell phones. "But for her, all of this is still just a rite of passage. I hope to move into the political or public policy sphere where I can help improve people's lives through government."

And what about Blake Ross, the father of Firefox? "I think I've got a couple more years in me in the computer industry. I have actually had these kind of secret ambitions that I want to write either films or novels. So I think, I think, I think life's too short to do anything for too long."

That may be a sound philosophy. After all, no matter how young you are now, there's always somebody younger. "The next generation is these kids that have grown up on the internet, that are turning in their homework via email, and you know, first grade. I'm actually frightened to see what they come up with."

"I really think age is just an illusion. I think that with the internet, people can do absolutely anything they want."