I definitely have highs and lows. Often, I’m at the high of a new idea–one that I think can be REALLY promising. This feels good. Really, really good. Mmmm. It’s so happy and life is worth living. But then, swinging to the lows, which are filled with disheartening moments of despair where I think to myself: it’s not worth it, everyone’s doing something, there’s no way to compete, even babies have their own pet projects, *kills self in self-hating moment*
- Anonymous Blogger

I read that quote a few nights ago, and I practically laughed myself to sleep. I love that quote, because it's true (and false) in oh so many ways. Many of you have had the pride and joy of thinking that you know the next billion dollar idea. For scholars, a similar feeling is found when you come to a philosophical epiphany. The high is so great, that it's difficult to get your mind onto anything else.

But also, as many of you know, that feeling sometimes hits its rock bottom when you think that your business idea won't work and your peers find the concept stupid at best. This is where I come into disagreement with the writer of the above quote -- I don't understand why people won't even attempt to make their business idea work. If they're convinced that their idea is the "next Google", how could it hurt to at least disprove that it is?

There are three types of amateur entrepreneurs out there, and in my young life, I've been every single one of them. By coming to terms with my failures, I'm more prepared to classify which type of amateur entrepreneur I am, and thus preventing myself from failing in the same way again.

Type 1 Amateur Entrepreneur: All ideas, no implementation.

Let's admit it. All of us have at some point thought of the brilliant, billion dollar idea. We brainstormed it out, thought about how rich and successful we'd be from having thought of the idea, then dreamt about living lavishly in a penthouse overlooking Central Park with enough money to feed every starving child in Africa. I've done it, and I know you have too. The problem lays in the fact that most self-proclaimed entrepreneurs are great at dreaming and envisioning their business idea, yet they lack the capability (and even willpower) needed to see it through. In my honest opinion, these people cannot be considered legitimate entrepreneurs if all they know is dreaming and allocating the task of implementation to others.

As a 5th grader, I started my first "company" and convinced my entire class to join me in my quest to build the internet's latest and greatest entertainment portal. Of course, I didn't know how to build anything more complex than a basic HTML website. My classmates lost faith in me, and I went down as a failed, type 1 amateur entrepreneur.

Type 2 Amateur Entrepreneur: Lots of ideas and half assed implementations.

These entrepreneurs think of good ideas and have the willpower needed to start working. However, they take the "fail fast" mentality way too far -- they'll launch a prototype of their project, put in almost no effort in getting it noticed, then call it a failure. Or even worse, I know of some entrepreneurs who dedicate months of their time working on a startup idea, but never end up launching. If you're going to fail, at least make people think that you spent your time semi-wisely. Alternatively, type 2 amateur entrepreneurs have multiple ideas that they're simultaneously working on, and figure that they'll get rich from at least one of them. To you and me, this is obviously flawed logic. But at one point, I was a type 2 amateur entrepreneur.

A few years ago, Alex Notov and I co-founded Shockapps.com, a pathetic startup that made numerous, half-assed attempts to launch a successful facebook app. We got a lot of users and made some money, but with a concrete and focussed development strategy, we could have gone much further. We'd launch three apps in a single month, but all of them sucked, and only one of them got traction. When your mind is distracted by the thought of getting rich from multiple business ideas, it can be difficult to follow the rationality behind having focus.

Type 3 Amateur Entrepreneur: Lots of ideas, lots of implementations, and absolutely no focus.

Type 3 entrepreneurs are marginally better than type 1 and 2 combined, but they have absolutely no time for anything other than their work. They make a solid attempt to see their business idea through, but get distracted by the idea of another growth opportunity. I feel bad for these people more than anything -- they try harder than both type 1 and 2 entrepreneurs, yet they often see just as devastating results. (and mostly on their psychological well-being)

Let's say Johnny has an idea for a million-dollar idea. He starts working on it, gets traction, and a loyal client base that's paying for his service. He then finds another growth opportunity -- perhaps a multi BILLION dollar idea that he thinks he should be pursuing. He's locked into business #1, so he can't just drop it. So Johnny starts building up business #2, it gets traction and a loyal user base, and now he's stuck handling two completely different companies. Now how lame would that be?

Unfortunate for my mom and I, but of us have been sucked into the trap of being a type 3 entrepreneur. In fact, my ninth grade business partly failed because of this trap. I started a simple, easy, cheap web hosting company as a way to cover the costs of having a personal website. I then realized that leasing expensive, managed, server solutions to small companies would bring me much more profit. Both businesses were doing pretty well, but they were sucking up all of my free time. What ninth grader should have to deal with the pains of school, running two companies, and the onset of puberty? Gag me with a spoon.

Going back to the quote -- yes, everyone is "working" on a project, but 99% of self-proclaimed entrepreneurs fit into one of the three profiles above. If you've thought of the next billion dollar idea, please refrain yourself from being an amateur entrepreneur. If you find yourself as being an amateur entrepreneur, it's not too late to change. Pick one idea that you're passionate about, and whole-heartedley follow through with your implementation. Forget about the babies who have their own pet projects! If you don't put in the effort to build your company, you'll see nothing but a self-hating outcome. To the blogger who wrote the quote above: when you make the time and find the resources needed to make your idea a reality, you'll experience the bliss of knowing that you've contributed to something amazing.

The past few days have been intense! In a nutshell, I've been looking at an internship -- yes, a JOB with a real COMPANY. It's come to my stark realization that I never thought about working for a company not so much because I thought corporations were dumb, but because there are few places that would allow me to explore my own projects. In other words, I would only work for a company that allowed me to be an entrepreneur within the company. While there aren't many companies with such a culture, I've started to look at a few companies that prosper on having creative and fast moving "intra-preneurs." My partial list includes Ning, Six Apart, PBWiki, and Ustream.

Of course, being that I'm bratty Jessica Mah, I'm super picky with the companies I would want to deal with. Here are my thoughts and reasoning behind the companies I've talked with so far:

1) I'm picky with the companies I interview with, and I immediately look for a culture fit. If anything, culture fit is the FIRST thing I look for in a company. If I'm not going to be happy there, it's not even worth a legit interview. What does culture mean? That deserves a blog post on its own, but it's so crucial for a startup to be fast-moving, communicative, open-minded, friendly, and enthusiastic. If the company has high-walled cubicles and segregated "departments," I have no interest in spending my summer there.

2) I don't accept offers from companies who don't thoroughly interview me. Sure, I think I'm a moderately smart person. However, I want to work for a company where people are brilliant. If the company doesn't bother to test my knowledge and skills, it shows that they don't take hiring seriously. With that said, if I get a job or internship offer from a company that doesn't spend the time needed to test me for culture and knowledge fit, I don't see the company as being good enough for me. Lesson: I only work for startups that make it difficult for me to get in. The next time you interview a "rockstar" prospective employee, keep this in mind.

3) Companies and employees need to give and take equally from each other. In my search for a summer internship, I'm not looking for a big name brand. I want to work for a company that lets me play around with my product management, business, and coding skills. I want to work for a company that wants me as much as I want them. One of the companies on my list offered to fly me out for a visit -- that shows a lot of dedication. It proves to me that the company wants me as bad as I want it.

4) Do programming ninjas talk to the business people? In other words, do the complaints and desires of the users get seen by the people working on the product? Sounds like a silly question, but so many companies (United Airlines among them,) don't have any connect between the customer support people and the executives who implement the changes. With that said, I like seeing companies where coders and business people are in everyday dialogue with each other. I love how Ning's customer advocate team also works in product management -- since they talk to customers everyday, they are more likely to know what changes should be made.

5) Money!!! As you've probably read before, compensation is not my #1 priority. However, it's not something that can be ignored. Living in the Bay Area this summer costs a LOT of money. I'll be paying $2000+ / month in various living costs that include food, apartment, transportation. Then I somehow need to pay off the $5,000 summer tuition bill that Stanford University is soon to send me. The startup scene is competitive -- In most cases, I want these companies just as much as they want me. If they want me to join on board, a competitive offer is definitely in order.

6) Networking, colleagues, and mentors. Last, but not least, I look for any potential to grow my network. I'm looking for executives who are well connected in Silicon Valley and beyond. I'm looking for colleagues who are open and willing to help me just as much as I'm willing to help them. With all of the companies I've applied to so far, I've either personally met an executive there or had one of my friends refer me. Never underestimate the power of a personal network!

With that said, I'll keep you updated with my internship hunt. Now you know the supposedly secret thoughts on what a self proclaimed teen entrepreneur looks for in an internship! Having this summer internship won't slow me down from being an entrepreneur. It's simply a way for me to further my learning -- a way for me to figure out how fast-moving companies survive and grow.

By the time I graduate with my Bachelor's degree in two years, I'll be fully prepared to take on the world with a company of my own.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

There are so many little things about a prospective employee that can tell you, as the entrepreneur or hiring manager, whether or not the candidate is capable of being a reliable, long term, team player. For example, if I'm hiring a person, I'm going to look at how many schools this person went to and whether or not s/he graduated. I'm going to look at his/her smoking habits. I'm going to look at how long this person remained at his or her last few jobs. If I'm hiring manager for a company like Google, which receives thousands of resumes daily, I'll quickly eliminate people who didn't get a college degree, who smoke on a daily basis, and who weren't able to keep a job for more than two years because each show a lack of commitment and/or a preference for short term over long term goals. There are so many brilliant people who don’t have college degrees, but it takes much longer to screen these people for commitment. I don't think companies like Google care about what you learned in college so much as they care about your desire to stay with a company for more than a few months. They want employees who are able to work on projects that they aren't necessarily in love with.

Many people critique Google for looking at college transcripts, but I'm going to defend them on this for several reasons:

1) High GPAs show the ability to do everything (besides business/computer science), and this is often a good measure for what happens in the workplace. This isn't to say that dropouts are unable to prosper at a company like Google, but it's an easier way to weed out the definite slackers.

2) A transcript allows Google to see what kind of courses you took. Did you only take computer science classes? Did you stick with your Jazz Ensemble for all four years, or did you join in and out depending on the semester? Are there any independent studies? All of these gives clues as to who the person is and what their commitment to their studies are. Maybe you took a class in philosophy which you had absolutely no interest in whatsoever, but were you able to get at least a B?

3) I hate to say it, but looking at college transcripts is an easy way to weed people out. If you're running an amazing company, you'll get thousands upon thousands of transcripts, and you can't possibly take everyone. By weeding out college dropouts and those with poor grades, it's much easier to focus on those who are likely to succeed in a large company.

As Seth Godin often says on his blog that resumes give a reason for companies to reject you, which is exactly why Google asks for them in the first place. It makes the hiring process much better for them! For those of you who don't have a college degree or resume, find people to hire you based on something you did. Through keeping this blog, I've received many recruitment emails from technology companies. Although I'm yet to receive my college diploma, I'd feel reluctant to hire someone without a college diploma unless s/he has solid work experience to compensate. Even a college diploma is no longer enough to hire somebody. I'll take this even further to say, if I receive an offer to work for a company without an interview and review of my past experiences, I would feel reluctant to join because it shows something about how smart my colleagues in this company may be.

The moral of this story: If you think rationally about it, Google has a reason to recruit people in the way that they do. Fewer people leave the company not just because they offer amazing job benefits, but because they attract people who are more likely to stick it out and see the good in whatever they're working on. Most of the people I know at Yahoo are high school or college dropouts, and most of them are seriously contemplating leaving their job. While Yahoo is yet to better their job benefits, hiring committed people from the onset is often a significant part of the battle.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Few of us are born entrepreneurial. We're geeks! We're engineers. We love computers, we love programming, and we've known this from an incredibly early age. Many people ask me when did I get into this geeky entrepreneur stuff. Well, easy! I remember tinkering with my Windows 3.1 desktop since kindergarten days. Daddy would teach me how to use the control panel, how to install/uninstall my kindergarten computer games, and I got hooked. I went to computer camp starting in 5th grade and started coding in C and C++. I didn't know that I'd one day call myself an entrepreneur. Ask the Google guys or Bill Gates what they were doing in elementary school and they'd probably reply with something quite similar. All of them stumbled on doing their entrepreneurial ventures not so much for the purpose of getting rich, but rather because they truly wanted to pursue their own projects and interests. The money is great, but the means are even greater.

This precisely answers why multi-level-marketers are NOT entrepreneurs: they don't care about what they're doing or what they're selling. They're obsessed with the idea of getting rich, and the means of getting there doesn't matter. They aren't invested in the process of creating a business and few of them are capable of it anyway. To start a company based on the idea of getting rich is probably not in your best interest for two reasons:

1) High expectations = high likelihood of being disappointed. Chances are, your business is going to fail. I know plenty of successful entrepreneurs who start new companies that fail, but with low expectations, they're able to get on their feet and start anew. If my expectations for starting a company are to have a good learning experience, there's no way that I can fail.

2) Money seeking entrepreneurs often fail because they over-plan, over-expect, over-demand, etc.. For small web/tech startups, it makes most sense to get a startup off the ground without much planning. If it fails, great. If it doesn't, even better! Plans are good for thinking things out, but they're often irrelevant because your company is likely to go in different directions from originally planned.

Entrepreneurs in business solely for money will hate their jobs. They'll get bored and impatient until they cash out their millions. Because of their disinterest in the means, these money seeking "entrepreneurs" prioritize short term gain over long term benefits. The term "money doesn't buy happiness" has some truth to it -- sure, money is what all entrepreneurs inevitably want, but it comes down to whether or not they're interested in the process of creating a project and turning it into a business in order to better pursue their interests.

Real life example: For the project that I just announced I was starting, one of my partners was thinking about planning things out and revenue models and all of that jazz - but personally, neither me nor my cousin are interested in that. We just want to make something new and awesome. I'll take care of the business development and revenue, but only because that's something I have A LOT of fun doing.

The point is, we didn't start or end as "entrepreneurs." True entrepreneurs always had a love for doing what they do, and they decided to be entrepreneurial because it gave them more opportunities to explore their interests and to create cool things. They care about money, but wealth isn't a requirement for entrepreneurs to want to start companies. Keep this in mind before you start your next company.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college, Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

I remember hearing about a huge and popular blog that did nothing other than post funny pictures of cats. Well, my next project will do something simple and stupid of a similar nature, but with music and videos and other 100% original content recorded in-house at the Berklee School of Music. You just wait and see! We'll be launching in the next few weeks...

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early college Bard College at Simon's Rock.

She loves chatting with fellow students, readers, and entrepreneurs, so don't hesitate to email her or message her on AIM! Feel free to subscribe to her blog or stalk her twitter.

Eli Pariser, the founder of MoveOn.org, came to speak at my college today! Ends up that he was once a student here at Simon's Rock, the Early College. Like the rest of us, he finished with a 4 year degree before he turned 20, and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Lucky enough, I was given the chance to introduce him to the audience :)

It was funny to hear that he interviewed here as a theater major and ran the school magazine that I cut funding on. Somehow, he shifted from being a liberal arts theater geek into being a leader of a huge non-profit. How did that happen? Completely accidentally. He didn't sit down with a few friends and decide to start a non-profit. He was a techie and set up an online petition calling for a non-military response to 9/11. Within a few weeks, half a million people signed the petition. By November, he was asked to join what is now MoveOn.org.

I found it especially interesting that he said:

"It's not all about a candidate. It's also a movement... Change cannot just be done by a president."

That goes to show that Americans (and organizations) love placing responsibility and blame on one person. Our president sucks not only because he's an inefficient leader, but also because he has an inadequate team. Whether or not you agree with his policies deserves a whole different argument, but it can be seen that he's failed at being the "CEO" of our country. If we want true change to happen, we can't just elect a new president. People who truly believe in an objective must continue to work with a leader to accomplish its necessary goals.

Image of Pariser with students in Simon's Rock College's Formal Lounge. Credit to Ryan Shepherd

We read about Eli Pariser in the news quite often. I've seen his name mentioned in Valleywag, the NY Times, and CNN dozens of times. Many people hate him and MoveOn.org for their views on politics. So I asked him, "how do you deal with people shit talking you all the time?" It comes down to fulfilling an objective. He isn't on this planet to be liked. He's working for a specific cause. I then asked whether or not he believes all press is good press. "OF COURSE NOT!" The point of having press for MoveOn.org is to spark discussion and to get the press going back and forth about those discussions. Looking at this from a marketing perspective, you're definitely getting 10X what you paid for when you spark the right questions. When the press continues to mention you over and over again for a question you asked or discussion you sparked, you're getting free coverage.

How about getting people to join a movement? He took psychology here at Simon's Rock with the same professor I took psychology class, and he was quick to mention cognitive dissonance and the "foot in the door technique."

"By making someone sign a petition, they're not just signing their name on a piece of paper. They're identifying themselves with a certain issue. They sign a petition, they volunteer, and they move up the ladder. A successful movement involves matriculating people up that ladder. It sometimes gets tricky because leaders need a balance between moving followers up the ladder VS finding a bigger base of supporters"

Does this quote remind you of anything? Running a business, duh! Back when I ran a dedicated server hosting business, my co-founders and I had to find the right balance between growth and maintenance. When to focus on current customers and when to focus on finding new customers. It's always an on-going conflict, and that's where staff recruiting comes in!

On another note, Pariser made a huge emphasis on listening to your followers. Take into account everything they say and let them help you lead. If he had it his way, he'd be running a site that did only what he wanted, but that would be impractical and inefficient. Even as a leader, you continue to learn.

Of course, Pariser hasn't had a perfect streak. We all hear about how he is the executive director at MoveOn.org, but he tried leading tens of other projects that didn't go anywhere. It's almost as if the press frames his life story as something that grew overnight. He developed as a person and he learned how to lead by managing many different campus projects, activities, and events.

I think it's safe to say that he's doing pretty well for himself... putting his personal finances aside, Eli Pariser is leading a project that has over 3 million members, that has raised over $100M, and is super passionate about the cause he's fighting for a cause he believes in.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore in college. She's currently the founder of a startup, managing editor at Startupism.com, and Jessicamah.com. In her free time, she enjoys the prospect of being an underage angel investor while partying like a rock star.