Ambitious Teens Seek Net Profits
Nick Cohen’s cluttered closet says teenage boy all over it. There’s an old lampshade, a box of crayons and, on a makeshift shelf, a humming, blinking onramp to the information superhighway.
Nick, 17, runs an Internet access service out of his bedroom--no time to make the bed--with his newly hired assistant, Ryan Bolger, 17. The two Los Alamitos High School seniors are among the first of a new breed of prom-going Net entrepreneurs with pagers, an 800 number and big plans to retire by, ahem, age 30.
Fueled by Mountain Dew and Taco Bell, distracted by honors classes and girlfriends, the two teens eventually want to hire other high school students to help with their 2-month-old business, Millennium Media. (Memo to applicants: Nick makes up to $40 an hour.)
This week, GTE will install a special cable to handle 25 new phone lines outside Nick’s bedroom, supplementing 11 lines in his closet, so that more subscribers can log on to the Net’s worldwide computer network via a local calling number.
“I used to want to be like [Microsoft Corp. Chairman] Bill Gates,” said the preternaturally poised Nick. “But I don’t have dreams of taking over the world anymore. I want a simple life. I want to retire early. I want a house on a lake in Montana.”
For now, the teens have signed up nearly 50 subscribers, even luring a few customers away from the No. 1 Net service provider, America Online. One of Millennium Media’s selling points: 5% of the $19.95 monthly access fee goes to a high-technology fund for the Los Alamitos Unified School District ($50 so far).
For now, Millennium Media is Lilliputian compared to giants such as Netcom On-Line Communications, which has more than 500,000 subscribers. But the two students want to eventually move into an office, hire more staff and continue to run the business from whatever college they attend next year.
Nationwide, nearly 3,000 companies sell access to the Net and its features, such as e-mail and the World Wide Web, according to Boardwatch magazine in Colorado, which tracks Internet service providers.
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Boardwatch Managing Editor Dave Hakala said he knows of only one other high school student, a 16-year-old boy in Cleveland, who runs a Net provider business. But he expects others to jump in.
“There has always been this core of young entrepreneurs out there, and the opportunity for them to get started as teenagers has just exploded out there on the Web,” Hakala said.
In Los Alamitos, Nick, the oldest of three kids, and his parents got the idea for the business earlier this year. Nick, who had developed a proposal to put his high school on the Net, couldn’t find a service provider that would work with the district’s fund-raising groups.
So the family decided to start one of their own.
Nick’s father, Bob Cohen, 45, knows a little something about computers. He is a sales executive for computer maker Digital Equipment Corp. Nick’s mother, Kari Cohen, 46, is a children’s writer. They put up half of the $25,000 start-up cost for Millennium Media; Nick kicked in the rest from his college education fund.
Bob Cohen sees a niche for such a community-based Net access service. The boys can zip over to a subscriber’s house if something goes wrong. And clients say they like giving high school students a shot at high-tech jobs and making a contribution to the school district at the same time.
“There’s a sense that this electronic stuff removes a sense of community,” Bob Cohen said. “What we’re trying to do is bring back a sense of community.”
Neither Nick nor Ryan have formal training in computer operations. They studied on their own, devouring computer magazines and tinkering with software programs. Both started playing with computers in grade school. They didn’t use the simple Monster Math computer game to practice multiplication problems; instead, they tried to figure out how the program worked.
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Clients say the teens are pros. Financial consultant Donald Jarnat, 52, said he initially wasn’t sure about hiring teens to help him navigate the Net.
“I had a little trepidation until I talked to [Nick],” said Jarnat, who had dropped an adult-run Internet service provider because of unreliable service. “He really knows what he’s doing. . . . I’ve been really happy with it. They’re real customer-service oriented, real friendly.”
Bud Dale, 58, a former America Online customer, said that he is also happy with Nick’s service.
“The guy is a student of computers. It’s easy to see that,” he said. “I was impressed with the young man.”
The teens talk up the service at district schools, which are scheduled to go online by the end of the year, and have distributed fliers through weekly newspapers.
So far, their system has crashed only a couple times. Each time, Nick was able to bring it back up within 30 minutes. Now he is trying to unravel a pesky problem that users sometimes have with getting e-mail.
Usually, the service runs smoothly. Bob Cohen handles the business end, such as billing and contracts. The teens do all the technical work. Their days vary, depending on what kind of calls come in. On average, they spend an hour or two a day on the business. As part of the service, Nick designs Web pages for a $40 hourly fee.
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Clients, some of whom are three times their age, treat them with respect, said Ryan, who sometimes roller-blades to school for exercise.
“They understand we know what we’re talking about. I thought I was going to have to be, ‘Hi, I’m just a kid,’ ” he said.
It’s hard to remember that the two denim-clad teens working in a bedroom alongside Lego toys and model airplanes are not old enough to vote.
“Hopefully, I can hand the company over to Ryan” someday, Nick said. “I’ll have to run the company for a while after I graduate from college, but hopefully I won’t have to go get a job.”
