A 13 Year Old CEO!

Yes, you read it correctly. A 13 year old CEO and an 11 year old VP, Sales.

My grandmother is no businesswoman, but I always cite two of her sayings pertaining to business:

  1. Doctors can earn even in a jungle,
  2. People will never stop learning/studying (formal education), at least not in India.

I personally believe very strongly that Education is an arena which hasn’t been exploited properly. NOT YET. It has a lot more potential. O’reilly’s School of Technology is an additional confirmation to my theory. I even consider Safari, a pretty smart and daring move.

I am also a very firm believer of the power of imparting lessons with fun, visuals or real life scenarios embedded in them. Some of the most prominent examples (that I am aware of) are:

  • The Head First Series from O’reily.
  • The flash/video presentations available all over the net. Coincidentally, Roman Strobl wrote about the great feedbacks he has been getting about his presentations.

I was really happy to come across the news of a new venture called Elementeo, aimed at imparting chemistry lessons with the aid of games. The most remarkable thing about the venture is that it’s CEO is a 13 year old kid, Anshul Samar (Indian origin! probably).
I really hope that these kids succeed in convincing some VC and eventually succeed in business too.

Looking at it all, I must say that my moves, that most blamed me for :), are proving to be good too. I am currently co-working on a Java book which will be published by Wiley Publication. The USP of the book, IMHO, is the virtual content. Through these video presentations, we have tried to map theoretical concepts to real (and fantasy :D) world examples. The best one from the presentations, IMHO, is the one where we (actually Rupi came up it 🙂 ) map access modifiers with Duck Tales characters.
However, my favorite is the one where I have done exactly the reverse. I tried mapping my REAL LIFE into CODES. 😛

Stay tuned for updates on the book… and wish us luck.