My entire entrepreneurship story in 10 minutes
justinkan.com
justinkan.com
Here is a follow up email I sent to Justin after discussing a problem we were struggling with at the time (his advice was great as always, even better was how optimistic we felt after speaking with him - that IMO comes from him being in the same place as you in the past and being able to relate to what you might be going through).
Justin I know you're a busy guy and have no time for fluff emails, but I'm gonna go out on a limb and tell you how awesome your advice was and how great we feel after office hours with you today. As you know, startups run on morale and I wanted to thank you for topping off our tank.
Also you should check out Airbnb and ZeroCater for companies that have great cultures. When you walk in those places you can tell that people love being there.
I would guess a lot of hackers on HN started young and already have several years of experience by the time they hit college. And by that point they might not even need to choose to study CS, instead rounding out themselves by studying other interests.
It really isn't that hard to pick up enough programming to build a simple CRUD app if you are dedicated enough. One great resource (although time-intensive) is Dev Bootcamp, a program based in SF that will teach you how to program in 10 weeks. I can't speak highly enough about Dev Bootcamp -- my youngest brother went through the last class with barely any programming knowledge coming in and at the end of it landed a full time programming job at a consultancy.
Alternatively, the classic method always works: just start trying to build something and google until you figure out how to do it.
Exactly how I learned as a 10-13 year old: I wasn't writing very much code from scratch, but rather gluing together large swaths of copy/pasted example code from the internet. It was messy and nasty, but by bending other peoples' code to do what I needed I slowly came to understand it.
I guess eBay was the few option available back then (fees must hurt!).
1) you can work on what you like, and in a way that you like 2) it's higher beta, meaning the top outcomes are higher than working for others. 3) it is a chance to immediately start working on a high impact idea that could change society. There are other ways to work on high impact ideas, but often times you need to put in a lot of time paying dues to get to the point you can work on them. 4) if you are successful, it can be a source of mainstream fame (think Richard Branson) -- if you care about this at all.
Here's a summary I wrote of my YC interview that I did with Emmett back in 2005: http://areallybadidea.com/34320844