Entrepreneurial

– Connie Loizos is a contributor for PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –

Recently, New York magazine featured Feross Aboukhadijeh in a piece titled “Bubble Boys”. Aboukhadijeh is a Sacramento-born, 20-year-old computer science student at Stanford who has been characterized as among the school’s most heavily recruited students by a course adviser. The piece suggested he may ultimately be among those geeks to succeed the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.

While perhaps a stretch, it’s easy to see Aboukhadijeh’s appeal. A year ago, Aboukhadijeh created a small media sensation with YouTube Instant, a site that invites visitors to scan YouTube videos in real time, and which Google was at one point interested in acquiring – along with Aboukhadijeh.

“They were talking about adding (the code) to YouTube and having me come on, but it never really worked out,” said Aboukhadijeh, who speaks quickly and breathlessly, like someone needing to get to wherever he’s next expected. “I’d only been in school for two years at that point. It seemed silly to stop and take a job. Then they said, ‘You can do an internship while you’re in school.’ But I wasn’t really interested in doing that. I knew that to do well (at Google), I’d need more than 15 hours a week. Also, when you join a new company, it takes three or four months before you’re even up to speed.”

Aboukhadijeh has some idea about what happens inside companies. Two summers ago, he scored an internship at Facebook, and it took “two months before I was going all out, doing stuff.” This past summer, Aboukhadijeh snagged another enviable internship, at the question-and-answer site Quora.

– Connie Loizos is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. –

Entrepreneur Peter Yared doesn’t mince words. In April, after TechCrunch misreported some of the circumstances around a Facebook employee’s termination, Yared wrote a widely read post titled “Why TechCrunch is Over” in which he called its founder, Michael Arrington, “insane,” adding that it “must be hard to live amidst a rapidly declining site.”

In more recent posts, Yared has called Twitter “primarily a broadcasting platform with very few active users” and unusable for “normal people.” He has also suggested that if he were to start a company today with either entrepreneurs Mark Pincus, Evan Williams, or Mark Zuckerberg, he’d go with Pincus “given what we now know” about Williams and Zuckerberg. (Both have been accused of elbowing their early co-founders out of the picture.)

– Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm in Boston. This post originally appeared on Bussgang’s blog www.seeingbothsides.com. The views expressed are his own. –

I’ve been worrying lately that we are suffering from a lost generation of entrepreneurs.

That was my first reaction when I read what Sequoia’s Doug Leone said a few weeks ago about innovation and age at a recent talk with MIT Sloan students visiting Silicon Valley. Leone claimed only people under the age of 30 are truly innovative. Over 30 folks can manage innovation, Leone observed, but you need to be under 30 to create it. He cited people such as Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder who was 30 at the time he started the service.