America's Best Young Entrepreneurs 2007

LOOPT
“…Loopt co-founder Sam Altman remembers listening to his Stanford computer science classmates yammer away on their cell phones after class, discussing their whereabouts and hatching evening plans. Altman, who describes himself as a tech nerd who was always passionate about mobile technology, imagined there had to be a more sophisticated way to track down friends. He came up with the idea of creating customized mapping software for gps-enabled phones, and dropped out of Stanford his sophomore year to turn it into a business…”

STUDIO10FOURTEEN
“…Ubong Attah describes herself as a serial entrepreneur. She ran a tutoring business in high school, taught herself web design in college, then started a web design firm her senior year called studio10fourteen, which she says is profitable and continues to operate. Ubong recently sold another business, an online jewelry shop, for around $55,000…”

BARNETT&ELLMAN
“…"We don't have to adapt to new media because we are new media,” says Tyler Barnett, co-founder of public-relations firm Barnett Ellman, which works with businesses targeting young consumers. Barnett says his definition of "new media" goes beyond social networking tools to include handwritten letters and faxes, which he says have been effective in getting attention for his firm's clients…”

TATTO
“…Lin Miao and the browns (twin brothers) founded marketing firm Tatto while students at Babson College in 2005 with a $100 investment (enough to pay for the first month's web hosting fees). Tatto's business model is simple: businesses with lots of advertising muscle such as blockbuster (bbi) hire Tatto to help acquire customers online. Tatto, using its proprietary technology, builds an inexpensive online marketing campaign to fulfill that demand. Advertisers don't pay for clicks or impressions; instead they pay when they acquire a legitimate paying customer. According to Miao, tatto serves more than 10 billion impressions to over 80 million unique users every month. He says revenues are $25 million for 2007 and expects them to grow to $50 million by 2008…”

AVANTGAUDY
“…"I'm looking to learn how to create a more socially responsible business," says Deborah Umunnabuike, a political science major at the University of Chicago and co-founder of Avant Gaudy, an online vintage clothing shop she started with her sister, Jessica, an undergraduate at Hofstra University, in the summer of 2005. The daughters of Nigerian immigrants started the three-employee business because they were passionate about clothes and saw a growing demand among their peers for vintage clothing. And they soon realized that there was a growing demand abroad as well, specifically in parts of Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia, based on analyzing web traffic to their site, almost 26,000 visitors from more than 30 countries. The sisters recruited Hong Kong native Vincent Choi to bring a global perspective to the business and better reach shoppers in Asia…”

CLIXCONNECT
“…Mitch Cohen, an undergraduate studying business at Mcgill University, started his latest company, Clixconnect, to help online retailers improve customer service on their web sites. Cohen, who started his first business when he was 16, got the idea after watching his parents become frustrated whenever they shopped online, often turning to a brick-and-mortar shop, where they relished being able to talk to a human and getting questions answered quickly…”

REDUX
“…Darian Shirazi remembers meeting facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg a week before high school graduation. He says they hit it off and Zuckerberg offered him a job. Shirazi, who had already been accepted at Berkeley, decided to do both. He majored in philosophy and worked at Facebook for a year and a half, watching it swell from 15 employees to some 250 employees, before leaving to start his own business...”

DEPARIS REDINGER
Deparis Redinger is a boutique investment bank that specializes in mergers-and-acquisitions advisory for small tech firms. Its founders, Kyle Redinger and Francesco Deparis, both did stints at Microsoft (msft) in its finance rotation program. They decided they could use their understanding of digital media to create a successful business advising startups that were at a disadvantage when negotiating with behemoths like their former employer.

AARROW
“…When Max Durovic and Michael Kenny were in high school, they had after-school jobs advertising for local businesses with sandwich board signs they strapped to their bodies and carried around the San Diego area. But the duo, who were both athletic, became bored with the traditional approach, so they started to do tricks with the signs, spinning them around and tossing them into the air to attract attention. Their antics captured prospective customers' attention. By 2002 the pair had started their own business, Aarrow advertising, with $100. They developed (and copyrighted) a number of athletic routines that involved manipulating six-foot-long arrow-shaped advertisements, turning the human wielding the sign into an advertising spectacle…”

TABLEXCHANGE
“…Tablexchange co-founder Gabriel Erbst liked eating at New York city's exclusive restaurants but often had trouble getting a reservation because his frenetic schedule as an analyst at an investment bank made it hard for him to plan ahead. Sensing that fellow professionals might be willing to pay a fee of around $20 to get a table on short notice, he launched the online marketplace to buy and sell restaurant reservations in june…”

UNIQUE SQUARED
“…"I know how crazy this sounds, but i want to be doing $100 million in sales in 15 years," says unique squared co-founder Richard Scalesse. Scalesse is excited. He says his audio equipment online retail shop, which he started with high school buddy Eugene Fernandez in a Georgia Tech dormitory basement in march, 2007, with an initial investment of about $6,000, is already profitable. In fact, Scalesse thinks total sales could hit $1 million by the end of the year…”

BLUEPULSE
“….Ben Keighran has been on the fast track since he finished secondary school in Sydney, Australia, when he was 15. After working at a web startup for a year and a half, he went on to study computer science at an accelerated schedule at the university level in Sydney. While there, Keighran got his hands on a Bluetooth device and programmed a hack for his cell phone that allowed him to use it as a remote control to control his computer's music player. He says his friends wanted him to program their phones, too, but there was no easy way to do it, because there was no universal mobile platform. So he built one ("having cut my teeth early on writing software for mobile") and put it on the web, asking for feedback and allowing developers to develop widgets for it…”

HOPEWINE
“…Forget "cause-related marketing." sure, Jake Kloberdanz knows that the success of such campaigns is hard to deny. He cites the example of Campbell soup (cpb) doubling its sales from the previous year when it printed pink ribbons on its packaging to celebrate breast cancer awareness month. But Kloberdanz, who was the philanthropy chair of his fraternity at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, wants to create a brand that donates to charity year-round. That way, he reasons, the brand isn't cheapened and customers have another compelling reason to buy the product…”

EDEN BODY WORKS
“…When she was just 11, jasmine was on her way to becoming an entrepreneur. After a chemical hair relaxer caused almost all of her hair to fall out, jasmine decided to make her own. She researched natural hair-care products online but wasn't satisfied. She found that most of them weren't all-natural products, so she put her allowance together and made her own, using ingredients such as lavender oil. "i thought i must not be the only one out there with this kind of problem,” she explains. "i wanted to share my invention with the world.”…”

HILLHOUSETAILORS
“…Shawn Liu was in grade school when his father left his job at bic and started his own ink manufacturing business out of the garage. Liu says watching his father develop his company—it now exports ink to china and employs workers in the u.s. And china—ensured "i wasn't moving in blindly" when he started his own business…”

POLINA FASHION
“…Before Russian native Polina Raygorodskaya started her fashion production services business Polina fashion, she worked as a model for major models in New York. Convinced she could create a successful business herself, she decided to put her modeling career on hold to learn more about business. She enrolled at Babson College, where she is now a senior studying entrepreneurship and marketing…”

ASR CLOTHING
“…When her counterparts in the fashion industry learn reed's age, she says they usually doubt the seriousness of her business. But that changes once they check out her line of streetwear hoodies, jeans, and t-shirts. Reed says she doesn't spend too much time worrying about her age, because she's busy running her business and majoring in retailing at Michigan state during the regular academic year and majoring in fashion merchandising and management at the fashion institute of technology in the summer. Reed expects to complete both degrees in 2008…”

UNIVERSITY PARENT MEDIA
“…When Sarah Schupp's parents flew in from Dallas to visit her while she was a student at the university of Colorado at boulder, she wanted a way to determine the best places for them to shop, eat, and stay but was unimpressed with the information available. That shortcoming led her to approach administrators at her school and propose creating a guide for parents. Even though she had no business background, they agreed, happy to have a way to connect with parents…”

FLYINGCART
“...Rishi Shah doesn't like clothes shopping. So when he was studying electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he decided to start a business that would allow users to get recommendations on what to buy based on past purchases. He envisioned national brands like the gap (gps) offering the service to their customers. Executives liked the idea, too, but in meetings told shah that they could offer such a service themselves…”

BRASS MEDIA
“…Six months into his freshman year at Oregon State, Bryan Sims' parents told him they had to file for bankruptcy. So Sims, who was on a scholarship, decided to drop out. His plan was to help his family by turning the magazine he had started (its mission was to make money relevant to young people) after graduating from high school into a profitable business. A few months after incorporating, he hired his father as chief operating officer. (Sims notes that he, not his father, is the founder and CEO, as well as majority shareholder.) The business broke even a year ahead of schedule and has been profitable since the beginning of 2006…”

YODLE
“…A few years ago, Wharton undergraduate Nathaniel Stevens was home trying to help his parents drum up prospects for their car dealership but became frustrated with the lead generation companies he contacted. He knew plenty of customers ventured online to shop but thought it was too difficult for small businesses to develop a presence there. So Stevens took a leave of absence from Wharton and started Yodle, an advertising services company that serves local businesses that lack the time or expertise to advertise online…”

AKT ENTERPRISES
“…As a member of an indie rock band while a student, Alex Tchekmeian agreed to handle his band's finances and order necessary merchandise like t-shirts and stickers. When other bands asked him for help, he agreed, starting several businesses that relied on subcontractors. He says that three years ago he started to take the business seriously, and dropped out of the University of Central Florida to devote more attention to it…”