Have you ever been bored in school? SO much so that you thought to yourself, “I think I should develop an app!” Well, the now 25-year-old Australian Benjamin Pasternak had that exact thought! At the age of 13, Pasternak was bored in a science class at school and chose to fend off boredom by designing his first mobile app, Impossible Rush. After showing his idea to an online friend who was an IOS engineer, they had a game created in a matter of hours. Soon enough, millions were downloading the app. At one point, the app was ranked no. 16 on the US App Store (IOS) top charts. In January of 2015, he was recognized by both Facebook and Google who offered him internship opportunities. Surprisingly, he declined these opportunities. Following this surprise up with another, he decided to drop out of high school and move to New York to accept venture capital funding and start his first business, Flogg, at the age of 15. Flogg, an app for young people to buy and sell, launched in 2016 and quickly become no. 1 trending app on the US App Store. Later in 2016, Pasternak decided to pivot. He promptly shut down Flogg and focused on a new app, Monkey. This new app, Monkey, allowed teenagers to video chat with like-minded people. Very quickly, in early 2017, Monkey raised 2 million in funding. 20 million users and 20 billion calls on Monkey later, Monkey also reached no. 1 trending app on the US App Store. Yet, there is more! Pasternak co-founded SIMULATE in 2018. SIMULATE aims to improve the world’s positive food system. In June 2021, it was reported that SIMULATE raised over 50 million in funding. From one raging success to another, Pasternak’s story is inspiring and shows incredible entrepreneurial thinking. The timing of pivots, the ideas for what people want, as well as the pure drive to create something and create it well all show vital pieces of entrepreneurship at work.
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Picture this: You are at a fashion show for New York Fashion Week. You watch as models show off the clothing of their designers in all their glamour. Later, you find out that one of the designers was a 13-year-old girl. Sounds like a made-up story, right? No 13-year-old girl could design clothing well enough for it to be part of New York Fashion Week, right? Wrong. Isabella Rose Taylor showed her Spring 2015 collection at New York Fashion Week when she was only 13.
Teen designer Isabella Rose Taylor makes New York Fashion Week debut | Daily Mail Online
What got Taylor to this point? Well, in an interview, Taylor said that her parents always encouraged her to follow her dreams and told her she did not have to wait to be her own boss and do what she loved. Taylor also said that she had been interested in art from a very young age, and at the age of 8, began incorporating “mixed media” into her fingerpainting. She also attended a summer sewing camp where she fell in love with the art. After the camp, she began making clothing for friends and family, which ended up becoming a full on business. Taylor used social media, specifically Facebook, to grow her business. Her Facebook profile “garnered the attention of local news outlets and eventually major national programs including the Today show.”
Taylor went on to gain more recognition and success. For example, she was invited to speak at Dell’s annual gathering of 800 leading female entrepreneurs. Today, Taylor still has success due to the company she started at age 13.
Ilona Maher is an inspiration to women athletes everywhere. She was on the Olympic Rugby team that won bronze in the 2024 Olympics and participated on Dancing with the Stars. She uses her social media platform, which now has over 7 million followers, to speak about body positivity and issues with being a female athlete. Starting rugby at 17, Maher was found to be talented in that area and won several championships as a collegiate athlete. She juggles not only sport training but graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing and a master’s degree in business administration. For the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Maher was selected to play on the rugby team, where she scored three times, helping the team grab a sixth-place win. While she was there, she filmed behind-the-scenes videos on TikTok that soon went viral. Fast forward to the summer of 2024, and Maher was selected again to be on the team. She used her videos to show her fans the stadium, what she did for practice, and more inspiring content.
Zach Yadegari is the perfect example of a GenZ entrepreneur, if there is one. He started off his entrepreneurial journey by teaching coding lessons when he was 10 years old. Once he got three clients at $30 an hour, he was hooked on it and began looking for new ventures that were more scalable.
His next business was an unblocked website that consolidated computer games. This ended up being a real success because it gave students games to play on their computers while they were in class during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It quickly gained 5 million users, and he sold the company for six figures.
After he sold his website, he partnered with one of his friends that he met at coding camp to create an app called Grind Clock. Its purpose was to provide motivation in the morning with David-Goggins style wake up calls. It quickly reached 20,000 downloads but then struggled with further growth.
This is when they shifted and started a new business, Cal AI. Zach was trying to track his calories throughout the day in order to make healthier choices, but he quit after the apps he was using all required manual input and were not very user friendly. That’s where he got the idea for Cal AI, an AI powered app that helps you track the number of calories in a meal just by taking a picture of it.
This is revolutionizing the health and fitness industry. Within 6 months of launching, he has reached over 1 million downloads, $12 million recurring annual revenue, and has built his team to 17 people. Zach is a great example of a young entrepreneur because he’s building this business while he’s still in high school. He regularly talks with his team during school hours and schedules meetings in the afternoons and evenings. He is hopeful for the future of the app and would like to continue using influencer marketing and more precise technology to scale it.
At the age of 12, Kenan Pala began his business Kids4Community. Kids4Community is a nonprofit in San Diego that offers voluntary projects where kids are encouraged to help as well. To understand the power of Kenan Pala’s mission. In 1998, Pala’s parents moved from Turkey to the U.S. and founded Confirm BioSciences, a drug-testing kits manufacturer and deliverer. The journey and transition were filled with many hardships; however, this is not what Kenan’s family remembers most. Instead, Kenan’s family remembers the incredible kindness of others shown through both financial and emotional support. “We started with very little means in our journey here, but we got so much help along the way and we’ve always felt very grateful,” said Zeynep Ilgaz, Pala’s mother. “If it wasn’t for the help we got along the way, we would not be here today where we are.” Through their past, Kenan’s parents instilled in him a passion and desire to give back. Kenan explains, “I learned to volunteer as soon as I learned to walk.” Built on these ideals, Kids4Community partners with organizations such as Interfaith Community Services to assemble and distribute care packages. These packages range from toys to hygiene kits. An additional focus of Kids4Community is homelessness. Kenan retells the story of jogging on a beach with his dad where he saw a sickly baby seal and people coming around it to help it. A few hours later, Kenan saw a sickly homeless man who was treated dramatically different from the baby seal. Where people crowded around the baby seal to help, people treated the homeless man as though he was invisible. Through Kids4Community, Kenan hopes to encourage younger kids to get involved in community efforts as well as create hope and love for the homeless. Kenan’s story is inspiring to me because he saw an issue that meant something to him and sought out a way to help people. Using empathy by way of entrepreneurship, Kenan chooses to make a difference.
Peggy Wang is a young entrepreneur who helped in starting Ego. Ego focuses on a sandbox style video game creator experience. Early in its development stages, Ego has worked with AI to help players develop and create sandbox style games into a simulation for prospective players and has raised nearly 7.5 million. Similar styles deal with well-known games such as “The Sims” and “Minecraft.” Ego’s comparative advantage deals with their ability to develop games through AI prompts such as ChatGPT. For many, AI has been seen as a cheat or shortcut in many cases. In the eyes of the entrepreneurial mind though, AI is an ever-growing resource which has opened unlimited possibilities and access to new beginnings.
Peggy Wang and her startup EGO has a main focus on simplifying the production of new simulation type games without the use of code through AI. Wang believes the use of AI promotes unlimited unique possibilities, providing experiences and processes that have yet to be implemented. Wang states “We’re building a game that people can play forever.” In a highly male dominated industry, Wang is bringing forth a new perspective reaching for male and female prospective gamers.
The use of AI has been extremely controversial over the last few years. The creative ability has amazed many through apps such as ChatGPT and OpenAI. Young entrepreneurs such as Peggy Wang are using these new resources to further creativity in areas such as gaming and graphic technology. While many are hesitant to use such resources, EGO believes in capitalizing on them and has been consistent in striving to gain “first mover advantage” and being “first at bat” in the use of AI and its endless knowledge to help others in the development of games and new tech in which a majority of young consumers are most interested in.
The Ultimate 30 Under 30 Forbes List of 2025 – GreekReporter.com
When it comes to making money at a young age reselling is one of the simplest and most efficient ways to do it. At the young age of 16 Benjamin Kapelushnik made the decision to resell sneakers and it changed his life. His company, Benjamin Kickz would grow into something much more than a kid trying to make money. Now in the industry, most people call him, “The Sneaker Don.” If you don’t know, the sneaker reselling industry is a crazy market, and before reading about ben I didn’t know that shoes could be that expensive. Ben’s plan of attack is pretty simple. He buys multiple pairs of the same shoes when they come out, then he sells them at a way higher price than they originally were. I think Ben has shown great signs of entrepreneurship and it should be motivating to all the kids out there to make money. Some of his most famous clients include DJ Khaled and Antonio Brown. I connect with Ben directly because my friends and I run a sports card business. Ben and my team have similar ideas when it comes to reselling. How we do it is we buy packs for around 7 dollars in hopes of pulling cards that we can sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. In just one summer of operation, we made over 3,000 dollars from just buying and selling cards. As you can see, one of the easiest ways to make money at a young age is to simply resell.
At just 9 years old, Alina Morse had the idea to create sugar-free lollipops. As a young kid, her parents always warned her to not eat lollipops because they would rot her teeth. Because of those warnings, she started to wonder why there were no lollipops that were actually good for teeth. Between school and extracurricular activities, Alina started to mess with multiple different recipes that would not damage her teeth. At 9 years old she made the recipe that she stuck with and she began to manufacture her lollipops in Michigan. Her business is called Zollipops, which her little sister came up with. Zollipops became available for purchase in 2014. These lollipops are all-natural, gluten-free, sugar-free, and vegan. Alina wanted to make these lollipops so that everyone could enjoy them without having to worry about the potential of damaging their teeth.
As her business continued to develop and as she did more research, Alina found out that tooth decay is a chronic issue for school-aged children so she decided to do something about it. She created the Million Smiles Initiative and started to bring Zollipops into schools so that these children could still enjoy lollipops. As Zollipops continued to grow, Alina started to create a variety of candy. Zolli Candy now includes taffy, hard-drop candies, caramels, and gummies. All of this candy is safe for teeth and made from natural ingredients. Zolli Candy can be found on multiple social media platforms and are also in numerous stores worldwide. Whole Foods, Walmart, and Rite Aid are just a few of the many places where Zolli Candy is available for purchase. Zollipops have become so popular that even celebrities have been seen enjoying these unique lollipops! Alina has loved being an entrepreneur and helping children enjoy sweets. She is not planning on stopping her business anytime soon!
What can you do if you are sick of piracy and love music?
Why, start a 97-billion-dollar company of course!
That was the primary reason for the conception of Spotify, says Daniel Ek, co-founder and current CEO of Spotify. Granted, the company had more humble beginnings than that. In 2006, Spotify was launched as a small start-up in Sweden. Ek said that he realized that you can never legislate away piracy and much like the reasoning behind Apple Music in 2015, the only way to disrupt piracy was to provide a better service for both consumers, artists and labels.
Being first to market in this area gave them a head start that has really paid off in terms of popularity. Even among the Apple fanbase, Spotify often reigns supreme. With 31% of the global market for music streaming, it is just over double that of Apple Music, which is at 15%. Part of this disparity is because of how Spotify lets users create a free trial. Spotify allows users to create a complete account with no limits on time or amount of music to listen to. The catch is that you have to listen to advertisements every so often and you cannot skip too many songs or it locks you from skipping more. This gets people in the gate right away and really just annoys them until they sign up.
However, there is an aspect of business that Spotify has been losing out on and could even lead to potential market loss in the future. One thing that Apple Music, Amazon Music and even YouTube Music to some extent have is products that benefit their respective services. Spotify has had the benefit of being the first mover, but they don’t have anything other then the streaming service itself. That is enough for at least 31% of consumers, but what about the remaining 69%? There is always from for improvement and always a way to curate more innovation.
Josh Feinsilber was in high school when he first had the idea for Gimkit. While brainstorming for a new high school project, he came across the quiz game Kahoot. This sparked an idea in his mind. He realized that the concept behind Kahoot had the potential to be a powerful teaching tool. With much effort and the help of a few other students in his high school, Josh created Gimkit.
Gimkit is a fun quiz learning application that allows teachers to create different “kits” that they can use to help students learn and memorize information. The platform has proven to be an incredibly useful learning tool for many teachers, with the ability to raise student test scores by as much as 14 percent.
Since its creation, Gimkit has grown rapidly and now has about three million users across 100 countries. In 2019, Josh Feinsilber had a projected net worth of $400,000.
Although Josh graduated from high school in 2019, he continues to work as the founder of Gimkit. His passion for helping students learn and teachers teach remains strong, and he continues to dedicate himself to improving the educational experience through Gimkit.