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Young Entrepreneurs of the Year: And you thought your day was busy Honored as a young entrepreneur, Gateway senior runs his own firm, volunteers, works and, oh yeah, goes to school Tuesday, April 10, 2001 By Eve Modzelewski, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Seventeen-year-old Jia Ji says any young person can become an entrepreneur. And he's proof of that. By the time Ji was old enough to get a driver's license, he had founded his own Internet solutions company and was running it from a spare room in his parents' Monroeville home.
Though he was honored last week in New York City as one of the country's top young entrepreneurs, Ji thinks his business accomplishments are nothing out of the ordinary.
As far as he's concerned, any teen-ager could do it.
"I don't like to be viewed as an exception," Ji said. "A lot of people my age don't regard entrepreneurship as a viable opportunity because they think it's hard to get into."
But it's easier than they realize, he said. The earlier an entrepreneur can get started, the better, he said. After all, overhead costs are usually low when mom and dad foot the bill for food and lodging.
And Ji noted, "Failing isn't that bad when you're young because you can always recoup your losses."
Ji, whose family moved to Pittsburgh from China when he was 3, went to a two-week business camp at the Carnegie Science Center in the summer of 1999, sponsored by the local chapter of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship.
That was when his ideas for Flying Fish Media started brewing and his online product began to take shape. At the camp, he had to come up with a name for his company and a motto, which he coined, "We soar above the rest."
Since then, he's worked on developing Web sites for about six for-profit projects and more than a dozen not-for-profit ones. He plans to use his company to help cover college expenses after he ships off to Stanford University this fall.
On Ji's resume of projects is NFTE's Web site, into which he incorporated animation, sound effects, music and photography.
Last week in New York, NFTE honored Ji and 24 other students from around the country as Young Entrepreneurs of the Year. Each was given $1,000 to help finance his start-up.
The other students' companies ranged from retail, fashion design and publishing concerns to a computer hardware maker. While in the Big Apple, the group toured the New York Stock Exchange, and Ji and his father squeezed in an evening at the theater to see "Rent."
NFTE was started in 1987 by Steve Mariotti, then a New York City public high school teacher. It was designed to teach low-income young people the business skills needed to start their own companies, and has helped almost 40,000 adolescents start their own businesses.
The New York-based foundation has regional hubs in London; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and other cities, including Pittsburgh.
The local hub, launched six years ago, has worked with almost 1,500 students. NFTE's BizTech class is offered at Schenley, Langley, Allderdice, Carrick and Westinghouse high schools, as well as the Boys' and Girls' Clubs.
To graduate, students have to develop and implement their own business plans, said C.J. Meenan, director of NFTE Pittsburgh.
"We'd like Pittsburgh to be the first city in America where every high school student has access to online entrepreneurship training," Meenan said.
NFTE Pittsburgh received a grant in January to train 30 teachers throughout Pennsylvania this summer at Carnegie Mellon University. NFTE University would teach the teachers how to teach entrepreneurship to young people.
While NFTE helped to cultivate Ji's business skills, his interest in computers was sparked in the late 1980s when his father brought home an IBM computer. Now, Ji specializes in Macromedia Flash and e-business work.
He devotes about 20 hours a week to Flying Fish Media during the school year and more during the summer, he said.
Ji also is editor of Gateway Senior High's student newspaper, volunteers to teach Spanish to elementary school students and just took a cashier position at Goodwill Industries because he wanted to try a "normal job." He's also at the top of his graduating class.
Ji said he balances it all by cutting back on sleep and drinking lots of coffee.
"I get really bored in school sometimes," he said "because a lot of what the American education system teaches you is concepts, and it doesn't make you apply them."
Entrepreneurship was a way for him to incorporate his ideas into practice, and even make some money while he was at it.
NFTE's Web site is www.nfte.com.
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