Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil
“In the Studio” marches on this week with yet another entrepreneur who on the surface seems too young to be a founder/CEO, until you peel back the layers and realize that he actually has a decade’s worth of experience building web products, has built his own consulting services, has built sites that have been acquired for real sums of money, spent his nights in high school in a big city tech scene, invested his own earnings into startups (which mostly failed), and after arriving in the U.S. to attend Y Combinator, is now leading a small team into the iPhone gaming market.
I’ll keep this post brief, mainly because I’d encourage everyone to really watch this video — perhaps twice — to really get a view into how an entrepreneur like Josh Buckley thinks. Buckley, who is 20 years old, began hacking on computers a decade ago, teaching himself basic programming languages, securing consulting gigs, and eventually going on to build products that were sold. At age 15, he made a larger sale, started traveling, and started investing in some of his friends’ ventures. Though he lost most of his invested money, he made one investment which gave him a view into Y Combinator.
Buckley eventually applied to YC, founded MinoMonsters, raised a seed round, and is on his way again to something of substance, either on this particular entrepreneurial journey or the next one, or the one after that. The one refrain from this conversation that made a real impression on me was Buckley’s insistence that his success so far is tied to him constantly creating new things — to building new things, to being a “maker.”
This conversation would be of interest to students who are already hacking or interested in computer programming, even in grade/middle school, as well as people who want a view into how the new generation of software leaders approach and conceptualize their challenges and opportunities. This is one of the more inspiring talks we’ve had on “In the Studio” so far, so I’ll stop there and let you watch the video.