Successful Startups Founded by Teenagers

Children and teenagers tend to be overlooked in the business sphere, excluded due to their youth, inexperience and general lack of expertise.

And, of course, there’s no doubt that this is generally both fair and true. It’s not unreasonable to expect that most of the time, kids will be kids – that is, most kids aren’t starting businesses and becoming millionaire entrepreneurs.

However, that’s not to say that children aren’t creative and don’t have good ideas. The problem is that they don’t normally have the resources and depth of understanding to take their basic ideas to the next level.

Why Young People Have Great Potential as Entrepreneurs

It may be difficult and unlikely for children and teenagers to be able to start businesses, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have potential. In fact, in many ways, children have a great deal of entrepreneurial potential, sometimes including qualities that many adults don’t have.

Young people can have great potential as entrepreneurs because they offer:

• A Fresh Perspective
• Focus on Problem Solving
• Naive Fearlessness and Optimism
• Curiosity and Imagination
• Technological Proficiency
• Passion
• Collaborative Outlook

The truth is, there are plenty of ways in which young people, teenagers especially, can provide different value to businesses and entrepreneurial ventures. Often, this is due to things that are often seen as disadvantages, like inexperience, naivety and more.

But sometimes, these so-called disadvantages actually allow young people to view things differently, lading to interesting and unique business ideas that become enormously successful.

Young Entrepreneurs Making a Difference 

There are the odd few youngsters that have set themselves apart from the rest, combining their good ideas with the resources they had access to – from university environments, good jobs and family members with funds for investment.

Here are five of the most successful businesses that were founded by ambitious teenagers.

1. Dell 

• Founder: Michael S. Dell
• Age: 19
• Year: 1984
• Most Recent Valuation: $81.72 Billion

Michael Dell, the namesake of Dell Technologies, was just 19 when he founded the now multi-billion dollar company.

A freshman at the University of Texas in 1984, young Michael Dell invested $1,000 into his newly-founded company, PC’s Limited, and by the end of his first year of college, he had left the education space to focus on growing his business full time.

By 1988, PC’s Limited had been officially renamed to Dell Computer Corporation, and the company was growing about 80% annually.

Dell has since achieved unfathomable success worldwide over the next four decades, with the company most recently valued at $81.72 billion in August 2024.

2. Facebook

• Founder: Mark Zuckerberg
• Age: 19
• Year: 2004
• Most Recent Valuation: $1.318 Trillion

Facebook’s origin story, so to speak, is fairly well-known thanks to the Hollywood blockbuster “The Social Network” which was released in 2010. The film highlighted Zuckerberg’s journey to success, with specific emphasis on his youth and relative inexperience.

While the movie may have been dramatised, the immense success achieved by Zuckerberg at the ripe age of nineteen years old is undeniable. Indeed, not only is Facebook, now Meta, one of the most profitable and popular companies in the world with serious influence on social, political and current affairs, it’s safe to say that its founder is also hands-down one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time.

3. Meet Me

• Founder: Catherine Cook and David Cook
• Age: 15 and 16 Respectively
• Year: 2005
• Most Recent Valuation: $500 Million

Dynamic sibling duo Catherine and David Cook founded myYearbook in 2005, having brainstormed the idea during their spring break. The startup began as a real family affair, with the siblings’ older brother, Geoff, being its first investor.

Within six years, the platform had 32 million users and was one of the top 25 most trafficked websites in the United States. And, by 2011, the company’s success was undeniable, and it merged with Quepasa Corporation. MyYearbook rebranded to MeetMe Inc. in 2012, and after acquiring several other subsidiaries, formed an umbrella corporation under the name of The Meet Group in 2017.

Now operating under the parent company ParshipMeet Group, the startup that began as a basic social networking platform is now a multi-million dollar corporation with more than 300 million registered users.

4. WordPress

• Founder: Matt Mullenweg
• Age: 19
• Year: 2003
• Most Recent Valuation: $596.7 Billion

Matt Mullenwg, born in 1984, is an American entrepreneur and web developer who co-founded WordPress alongside Mike Little in 2003. The aim behind the platform was to simplify blogging, making it more accessible to people with little to no technical know-how.

WordPress was established in the wake of the b2/cafelog software being discontinued by its main developers, leaving Mullenweg and Little to identify a gap in the market. Matt Mullenweg was only 19 years old at the time.

The pair went on to very successfully that gap, beginning an endeavour that became enormously successful. Indeed, today, WordPress powers 43.5% of all websites, acting as a content management system (CMS) to more than 478 million websites around the world.

5. Injective Protocol

• Founder: Eric Chen
• Age: 19
• Year: 2018
• Most Recent Valuation: $2.14 Billion

Launched in 2018 by co-founders Eric Chen and Albert Chon, Injective Protocol is a decentralised exchange (DEX) that has been built on the Cosmos blockchain. The platform offers services including forex futures trading, derivatives and cross-chain margin trading, among other things.

The company began as a project that operated as a subset of the Binance Labs Incubation Program, with Chen and Chon aiming to create a network that was IBC-enabled in order to allow for the trading of Ethereum-based assets on Injective Protocol’s DEX.

Chen’s interest in crypto began while he was still in high school, having first delved into the industry in 2012, six years before he and Chon went on to launch Injective Protocol in 2018 when Eric was just 19 years old.