The Teens in Tech inaugural incubator program officially kicked off on June 22 and runs for 6 weeks. The incubator is housed in Appcelerator’s new headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Each team consists of one to three teens, all under the age of 19, who will work alongside mentors and advisors to build their own startups. The program culminates with each team launching their product as part of a Demo Day during the annual Teens in Tech Conference, taking place on August 5 at Palo Alto Research Center in Palo Alto. Three of the teams will use Appcelerator’s app development platform, Titanium, to build fully native apps that can run on desktop, web or mobile devices. The select teams are:
Codulous (Santa Cruz, CA): an online code editor that works in the cloud and syncs with your desktop and many other services
BuyNomial (Oakland, CA): helping you budget for whatever you want in a faster and smarter way
MySchoolHelp (White Plains, NY): making it easy for high school students to find and share their classmates’ notes
Bubbls (Palo Alto, CA): a geo-social mobile application that lets your friends know when you can hang out
CM Studios (Atherton, CA): bringing a zombie game to the iPhone, and soon Android
Workcrib (Walnut Creek, CA): a social sharing site for your workspace
The Teens in Tech Incubator program features numerous experiential and hands-on learning opportunities. More than 60+ tech veterans, VCs, and others volunteer as mentors and advisors are teaching classes weekly on everything from HTML to CSS to marketing and presentation skills. Some of the program’s mentors lead weekly dinners, sharing their own personal life stories, such as when David Crane, a partner at Google Ventures, spoke to the teens about how Google got started. There are also “Office Hours” and “Workshops,” where mentors join the teams on-site and help them work on their business plans, presentations, coding, etc. Held throughout are various white board and collaboration sessions.
“Entrepreneurship should not be defined by age but should be all about fostering the most promising innovation,” noted Daniel Brusilovsky. “With the broad support from the tech community, our new incubator program will encourage today’s youth to start early, think big, take risks, learn from failures and gain from successes. We’re very grateful to all the companies, mentors and advisors who have graciously contributed to our endeavor and mission. The support ecosystem inherent throughout Silicon Valley gives evidence to why the region is one of the most innovative in the world. However, it also lays a solid blueprint for others to adopt and benefit from.”
The Teens in Tech Incubator program boasts a stellar lineup of mentors and advisors, some of who include:
- Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO, Appcelerator
- David Hornik, general partner, August Capital
- David Krane, Partner, Google Ventures
- Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO, Box.net
- Chris McCann, co-founder, Startup Digest
- Marcus Nelson, director of social media, Salesforce
- Alex Pachkov, VP of business development, Evernote
In addition to providing the technology and serving as mentors, the team at Appcelerator is also providing the physical office space to host the incubator teams throughout the program’s duration.
Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, noted, “I started my first company when I was 14, and there were a lot of people who generously helped mentor and provide me with valuable guidance along the way. Having benefited from that support network, I think it’s important for seasoned entrepreneurs to pay it forward and proactively lend a guiding hand to our next generation of aspiring tech entrepreneurs and contribute to them hopefully building the next Google or Apple.”
Along with Appcelerator, the Teens in Tech Labs has support from Microsoft, General Motors, Softlayer, Globumbus, Eventbrite, Meshin and Gagnier Margossian LLP.
To see the full list of mentors and learn more about the Teens in Tech Incubator program or the Teens in Tech annual conference please visit: http://incubator.teensintech.com/.
