I'm 17 and grew up on Halo CE with xchat back around 2001 to 2003. A large portion of my teenage years (and most of my friends') was spent on Halo 2 as well...4chan was all the rage 2005-2008. Early 2008 until now it's been supplanted by HN and Reddit.
When I wasn't playing Halo, I spent a lot of time reading and editing Wikipedia, which might be something for kids to try out now. But Wikipedia's barrier to entry has risen significantly...one of the reasons I've quit the community there.
Eventually, it'll turn into a war between time spent on "productive" sites and activities, and time masturbating to porn, in my experience.
4chan isn't just /b/ and /b/ isn't all of 4chan as the saying goes...
Most of my time there was on /g/ /w/ and a few other boards like /mu/, but I first got hooked because of the raids on Wikipedia. 4chan is a fascinating place, not just full of CP as some would think.
Yep, this is why I always buy Lenovo notebooks. Great customer service, no bloat added on (except Thinkpad line), and I can diddle around quite easily with out any gotchas like other manufacturers.
They run Linux and FreeBSD kernels really well with all hardware components working out of the box as well. Compared to my last experiences with Dell and HP, I'm sticking with Lenovo and Apple for good.
Would love to hear about how you market to school districts/large school units.
I built a product (back in 2008) that was aimed at the education sector for students and teachers to use to study in groups, but alas it never got much traction with large groups like I intended. But it was heavily popular with international users from (mainly) Europe.
I had pretty much 0 luck marketing to school districts or schools, just a few classrooms.
It seems the school district market is a hard nut to crack that I've been wondering how one can angle on..
All the ones I've gotten so far have all come to me. So I'd say win over the teachers and let them sell it for you. Especially since a lot of districts will pay for stuff like this, the teachers know that and lobby for you.
Really, you don't "need" YC to build your own startup...
This is personal, but I've been running of side projects/webapps that make decent revenue from ads and (in one case) a freemium pricing model.
I'm all of 17 this year and have been doing this for about 4 years now...
YC is only nice because it gives you (1) Lots of investor and public interest via TC and other blog articles. (2) Great advice, tips, and help via pg, harj, jessica, and the rest of the gang as well as the (pretty large now) alumni network of successful YC-funded startups.
YC admits teams that have no product yet to those with several years of experience in their market. It's going to be a bit more competitive now that everyone knows about them plus the whole big-money-addon deal by Yuri Milner, but if you have the skills and believe you have a good MVP to pitch to YC...fly on over to Silicon Valley.
Again, IANAL so there are probably plenty of stake-holders rights things to deal with if you're not of the age of majority and other little things that might be a barrier, but I'm waiting to hear what pg and others with more experience have to say on the matter.
I'm in pretty much the same boat as you, I have been running projects for a while to pay my way through school and I understand that to start a startup we don't NEED YC, the point is we WANT YC onboard.
I have (or will have in a couple of days) another two founders on the small team working on the project and they are both significantly older than me, so hopefully that could help towards solving a few of the legal issues, the question is, would pg/harj/jessica and co. accept a young founder in a team of older founders?
This is why I loved the Full Flat Absolute Black[1] and its brethren themes for Firefox back a few years ago, exclusively.
Sadly, the developer has not updated them in a long time (2008!), so one must go through the hackish method of updating the maxVersion by downloading, opening, and editing the addon oneself. Even with this, there are a few platforms it doesn't work on fully.
If you recall the last zf0 zine (zf05.txt), Anonymous was shown to have a loosely organized group who directed raids when they picked up enough momentum and convinced enough kids and btards to launch LOIC. Most other anon jump on when there is sufficient critical mass and coverage, resulting in more lulz to be shared all around. Technically we are all Anonymous.
It might not say it is encrypted, but I doubt the publishers/who ever they have deals with to stay legal would allow them to transfer copyrighted materials in the clear.
When I wasn't playing Halo, I spent a lot of time reading and editing Wikipedia, which might be something for kids to try out now. But Wikipedia's barrier to entry has risen significantly...one of the reasons I've quit the community there.
Eventually, it'll turn into a war between time spent on "productive" sites and activities, and time masturbating to porn, in my experience.