This post was inspired by a discussion in my psychology class about how money doesn't buy happiness

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.

Virgin founder/chairman Richard Branson and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page just posted videos on the first manned adventure to Mars -- except they wish to inhabit the planet with colonists for years to come!

Cool idea? Check. Suspicious? Definitely. Here's what I found off the FAQ page:

oh, all right. Fine. April Fool's. Ha, ha, ha. It isn't real. There. Are you happy? Does it please you to drag us out of our lovely little fantasy world, to crush all our hopes and dreams? Is that really what you need to hear? Fine, you've heard it. Virgle isn't real.

Yet.

Sure, they posted this on April 1st. But for some reason, this project sounds just crazy enough for Richard Branson to endorse it.

Jessica Mah is a 17 year old entrepreneur, blogger, and sophomore at early collegeBard 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'm sitting in a panel moderated by Guy Kawasaki and he wanted the panel to be women only, which got me to think about the different type of women entrepreneurs there are.

Firstly, many women entrepreneurs I meet seem to run a business geared towards other women. Most of the women on this panel had businesses that target women. This isn't a problem at all. If anything, it can be a smart thing. My mom, for example, makes clothing for women not just because she knows that business best, but because it makes more money than men's clothing does.

Whenever I'm introduced to a female entrepreneur, it's almost as if I'm expected to make friends with them. I don't make friends with many women in business and tech for some reason, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with this. To the guys: just because you're a guy doesn't mean you'll automatically click with other guy entrepreneurs! Same thing applies to girls. When I meet a new girl, I see if they fit into the following categories. If they do, fine. If not, better. Personally, I dislike the idea of girls who fit into cookie cutter categories, but there are so few of us who can truly be considered unique. Here are the stereotypical categories that I commonly see:

1) The geeks: I meet many girls who are incredibly friendly, but they're geeks. They spend the majority of their time working, working, and working. I find it hard to click with the hardcore female geeks because they don't believe in fashion or partying. You may not see many of these girls because they're so incredibly sheltered.

2) The blogger chicks: These girls may or may not have a functional business, but they sure know how to write! They often attract overly obsessed and sketchy guys. I can safely say that these are the girls you're probably most exposed to. Such blogger chicks include the likes of ijustine.

3) The suits: For some reason, men in suits have an intimidating vibe behind them. They don't know jack about technology, but they sure know how to talk. Women in suits can be no different. Meg Whitman, for example, was CEO of eBay.com and is probably incapable of installing a simple PHP script. She's 100% the business type and she does a great job at this, but you don't see a sense of fun or girliness in this type of girl.

So you ask, where do I fit in? Where do my favorite women entrepreneurs fit in? From what people tell me, I can fit into one of these or all of these. Back in computer camp days (yes I used to be a total dork) I would definitely place myself as a geek. Last year when I had no company in the works, I was a blogger chick. Now, I'm seeing myself more and more as all of the above. The girls I generally click with fit into multiple categories. The hardcore geeks have no social life. The absolute hardcore blogger chicks have no aspiration to have a career. The suits come off as being too elitist.

Let's look at a real life example: Patricia Handschiegel. I have so much respect for her as a female entrepreneur because she's a hard worker, yet she's fun and enthusiastic about managing a good work/life balance. Cheers to her recent sale of StyleDiary.net! If only there were more entrepreneurs like her out in the world...

The absolute biggest problem for female entrepreneurs is perception. The above categories can apply to guys to some extent. The popular stereotypes are guy geeks, surfer dudes, and elitist men. In the media, you mainly see the stereotypes. For girls, you mainly hear only about blogger chicks. For guys, you see all of the above categories. If the fun and brilliant female entrepreneurs got some more exposure, we would definitely see more women entrepreneurs out there.

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. (and traveling to random cities and checking into hotels while being underage)

I love speaking out about companies who've done wrong. I've done it with companies such as Serverbeach and Comcast, and plenty more. I'd say about 50% of the time, I receive a response from the company. When I hear from a company official, there's a 99% chance that my issue will be resolved and that my service will either be reimbursed and/or improved. Here's a list of my top three examples of companies doing the RIGHT thing to satisfy their customers:

So lets take bad service company #1: Serverbeach.

On the morning of October 20th, my ServerBeach services went offline. The reasons are beyond me and irrelevant to this topic. The company had a service level agreement that promised reimbursement for my services if there was any downtime. I blogged about my complaints, and I received an email from company officials within an hour. Since then, the company has provided me over $100 in reimbursement and my servers have stayed online since. I'll call this success and forgive ServerBeach for that mishap.

Lets make bad service company #2 Comcast.

Just a few days ago, my comcast service was shut off. The service has always been buggy, and their customer support was slow and non-existent at super late hours. Of course, I blogged about it. Within 24 hours, a company official contacted me to help address the situation. A customer rep called, my service was put back online, and my co-founder (who's using this comcast service) claims that our cable speeds have gone way up! I'll call this too a success. Yet again, it shouldn't take my bitching to fix the problems.

Last, but not least, I'll give my final award to Jajah.

Back in December, I was trying to make an outgoing call to my mom when all of a sudden my Jajah service cut off. Ended up that my account was out of funds, so I tried to make payment with a new credit card. It didn't work, so I blogged about it. Within two hours of posting my complaint, the director of marketing gave me access to a company account and fixed the issue by the next morning. Talk about good customer support! Why can't all companies be this good?

I've wrote negative reviews about plenty of other companies who never got back to me. Take for example United - I blogged about them a few days ago and no company representative has contacted me. I complain about AT&T quite often and they're yet to make me happy for the hours of my time they've wasted. I once wrote about how oDesk is better than Elance, but amazingly enough, Elance company officials invited me to their office for (beer) and pizza! It was surprising, yet amazing. Again, why can't all companies be that way?

I'm sure there are plenty of other companies I can add to this list. But for now, the three I mentioned deserve some praise for actually taking care of customer complaints.

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.

So many books talk about how entrepreneurs did this or did that, but it's all about the team. I didn't do jack compared to my counterparts. I found a few super motivated kids my age who wanted to join in on the business venture, and we split the work out depending on where our skill sets were. I did business, sales, marketing, and intermediate level tech support. Alan was a hardcore techy. Tyler filled in for both me and Alan. This brings me to my next lesson from when I supposedly ran a business back when I was 13: Your team matters more than you do. Make them happy, and they'll save you when you need them most.

Mishap #1: (4 months in business, 300 customers) I was driving down the freeway with my family on a rainy day in July. We were driving up the Jersey Coast, going to our next vacation destination. All of my responsibilities were temporarily designated to one of my co-founders, Tyler, and I received a terrible phone call:

"Hey umm... our servers are down! All of our customers are bitching at us!"

Oh. Bloody. Hell. We had downtime for the next 48 hours and eventually found out that one of our customers, once again, was phishing. In other words, somebody with an account on our primary machine was pretending to be PayPal and sent out fake emails. All of this from OUR server. This cost the company a few hundred dollars in revenue and thousands more in potential business, but it was a good lesson that I learned young. a) invest in security, b) figure out ways to get your customers online if such a problem ever happened, c) compensate them for having suffered through your stupidity, and d) be transparent and honest as to what happened. We failed to do all of the above when we needed to. Fortunately, we learned from these mistakes. We ended up giving out heavily discounted services and emailing updates to customers when they suffered through our careless mistakes.

Mishap #2: (9 months in business, 700 customers) I was in a hotel room on December 31st a few years ago. It was 11:59 and 15 seconds (+/- 10 seconds) and suddenly I get a phone call. Of course, another problem while I'm trying to enjoy my vacation. Co-founder Tyler tells me that some f**khead hacked into all of our servers and wiped off our clients' accounts. Not. Funny. Except this time, we learned from our mistakes. My other co-founder, Alan, was also a nerdy Asian. He was brilliant. An absolute genius. He found out what happened and he patched the problems up within 15 minutes by reverting to our backup machines. Since this was new years, nobody was looking. We were so fast with getting things back online that not a single customer sent us a support ticket. This brings me to my next super important lesson: Always critique yourself and learn from your mistakes. If something terrible happens, (such as if some dickhead deletes all of your customers' accounts,) then learn. Figure out what happened, patch it up, and promise that it'll never ever happen again in the future. And if somehow it does, you're going to lose business.

More to come on my stories from when I was a stupid, arrogant, teenage entrepreneur!

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.

Gosh... ok, I'm so out of breath! Basically, the conference people wouldn't issue me a press pass until 10AM. Oh wait, the keynote ends at 10 something AM. Oh noes! Of course, I wasn't planning *not* go to the keynote. That's the only thing worth seeing! So me and a huge mob of Apple geeks marched across the street to Moscone West and did everything from cut the line to just walk right in. Most of you know that I'm no newbie to Moscone West. Remember how I got front row seats at the Web 2.0 expo keynote even after they overflowed? Well, I managed to find a way into Macworld's keynote, sitting next to the people who've been waiting on line since sunrise. I'm on the press list, but let's just say that the security people "forgot to check the press badge that I'm yet to pick up." I didn't get front row this time, but I'm not complaining. :D The following coverage began at 9:20AM:

I'm sure you've read the predictions: Movie rentals, iPhone/iPod Touch upgrades, etc... Newbies:

- Apple TV Take 2: No computer needed and the capability to rent movies for $3 or $4. It has a kickass interface as usual with all Apple products. Steve was trying to demonstrate the Apple TV's capability to take photos from Flickr, but the silly photos wouldn't pop up! So he ended it by saying something among the lines of, "oh well, Flickr doesn't want to display the photos... So isn't that amazing?" What a great speaker! The price of an Apple TV was downgraded from $299 to $229. Again, Yay!

"There's something in the air," says pretty much every huge banner here at MacWorld. What the hell does that mean? We've been hearing about it for weeks now, and Apple has finally launched the MacBook Air. "In a sentence, it's the world's thinnest notebook." And that means what, Steve? A 3 pound, 0.76 inch, envelope sized laptop. No new product introduction is without an impressive introduction: Steve brought out the laptop in an envelope! Downsides? A tiny 80 GB HD for one. A lack of CD drive for two. You expect a small battery, but no: 5 hours in that tiny piece of beauty! The laptop starts at $1799 and ships in two weeks.

Phew, wasn't that exciting? On another note, I was silly enough to bring my Dell laptop to MacWorld. Big mistake. I almost died. Pictures are forthcoming.

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.

Arg, it's raining down here in Nevis. Oh well, I'll give you guys a blog post.

Edit: The following post is based on supposedly false information. One of the founders sent me a nice email addressing the situation, which was a really smart move. Whenever someone writes false and misleading information about your company, immediately address the situation. Well done, Mr. Co-founder. See here. ANYWAY,

I was reading up on my juicy tech gossip at Valleywag and heard about a site, Famesource.com, buying Indian users at 10 cents a piece. The website sets out to connect wanna be celebrities with fans and representation. For example, if I wanted to be a famous rock star, I would upload my bad music and hope that fans vote me up and a talent agency signs me on.

The company is supposedly buying these users at 10 cents a piece because it will help gain traction and attract the eyeballs of investors. My primary concern would be how this could backfire on the founders. Investors will want REAL traction that will bring REAL revenue, and a scam plot like this can only look bad for the young company.

In an interview with one of the founders, he says that its all about "getting exposure..." except isn't it so obvious that the type of exposure is a primary concern? If I'm a wanna-be rock star, why would I care about random guys from India if they aren't going to be true fans? If I was that wanna-be rock star on famesource, I'd be pissed.

But of course, they have a spot on CNN's weekly airing of "Young People Who Rock." I'll let you know when it's my turn. :)

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.

Word in the blogosphere is that T-Mobile is blocking Twitter for all customers... and of course, the customers aren't happy. Firstly, what could have caused this?

T-Mobile CLAIMS that Twitter isn't an authorized third party service, as noted below:

"T-Mobile would like to bring to your attention that the Terms and Conditions of service, to which you agreed at activation, indicate “… some Services are not available on third-party networks or while roaming. We may impose credit, usage, or other limits to Service, cancel or suspend Service, or block certain types of calls, messages, or sessions (such as international, 900, or 976 calls) at our discretion.” Therefore, T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.”

Some believe that T-Mobile considers Twitter a small startup, and that's the reason why they're blocking the service. Sounds more like a cover-up for the truth.
However, my original thought was that Twitter caused a substantial traffic load. The passionate Twitter users would post an update of where they are and what they're doing every half hour. These passionate users are friends with hundreds of other Twitter users, so there are so many messages going back and forth. Over the course of several months, it has been adding up, and T-Mobile wants to save money from this overload.

So what does this mean to the company?

1) Bad: Passionate Twitter users aren't only go leave T-Mobile in favor of a better service, but they'll also make word known in the blogosphere that T-Mobile is anti third party services. There's an exponential negative effect here because T-Mobile loses customers while those customers prevent prospective customers from signing up with them. All of this for just a few cents saved from less traffic?

2) Maybe it was a good move, for all we know. Maybe there was some deep security threat, or the price of allowing Twitter users on the network was too high. Beats me.

Either way, it's important for big companies to keep in mind that any change they make, no matter how *minor* it may seem, may potentially hold a significant impact for the company, or more importantly, customer loyalty.

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.

Best. Class. Discussion. Ever. It was our last "sophomore seminar" class of the semester, and we discussed the definition of modern. And with the definition of modern meant greater access to information via the internet. We're dependent on the internet and our Facebooks, and if anything happened to take away our individualism, we'd be screwed.

I'd say about half of the class would agree with the following statement:

Facebook and other social utilities create a false sense of community.

Putting that quote in context, my peers are having trouble accepting Facebook, social networks, blogs, and other constructs of the internet. Why? Because there's apparently the suspicion that all of these communities are created by capitalism. Entrepreneurs who seek wealth from children who have nothing better to do with their lives than click through Facebook profiles and what not. Even though it's free for the consumer, it doesn't matter - my peers have a distrust for these internet companies because they have a profit motive behind these "modern" inventions.

So what do these entrepreneurs' profit motive have to do with anything? I don't know, maybe my peers are scared for their privacy. Maybe they think that social networks are preventing people from meeting and hanging out in person. Maybe they're annoyed by the dozens of app requests they get every day.

Bottom line, entrepreneurs and random folk in San Francisco don't give this stuff as much thought. We embrace and accept web 2.0 for what it is and have no problem with new innovations flooding the market. We encourage open and free access to information, whereas my colleagues in college (all in sophomore seminar) are hesitant about accepting the change in status quo. The only exception was this one girl named Faine, but she's one of us west coasters :)

Just keep these ideas in mind. The way we embrace technology so easily is unique to us. If you're reading my blog right now, I'll consider you part of "us." I helped start a company around building Facebook apps, and it's somewhat disconcerting to hear that most college kids absolutely despise Facebook apps. But yet again, screw them. There's still demand and there's still money out there, no matter what these non-embracing kids say.

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.

Update: Jajah.com contacted me within 30 minutes of publishing this post... they got me a temporary account ASAP, and had the credit card problem fixed in under 24 hours. That's what I call superb customer support. Now if only my Jajah Firefox sidebar didn't screw up constantly...

Original Post: Firstly, I love Jajah when it works. It's a great concept that I've spent so much time using ever since coming to college. For those out of sync from the tech startup world,

Jajah lets you call from any landline for 3 cents a minute just by typing in your phone number and the destination phone number while logged into a Jajah account.

In any event, I had about $1 and my credit card died on me. Secretary says I maxed it out, so I decide to use up the rest of my account balance. I finally get down to my final cent, and as I'm having a bonding experience with my mom over the phone, it disconnects us! So far, no fault to Jajah. So I log back in, change my credit card number, and it says that I can't pay with this new card because I'm already paid with another card. But doesn't that defeat the purpose of me "changing credit cards?" Why even give me the option if you won't let me do it! Observe:

Notice how I only have 1 attempt left... that's after trying two different credit cards, both confirmed working. (Tested by purchasing "How to Win Friends and Influence People" for my mother just a few minutes after my botched payment attempt) OK - Point is, there's nothing more frustrating than finding a product you love only to find that the company doesn't have the technology to allow you to pay! Pity...

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.