High School Business to College Prodigy?

8/6/03 - Three years ago Michael Simmons was a school boy – he still is. A senior at Hopewell Valley High School in 2000, the year the Internet soared to the sun, he, along with legions of other precocious kids, was the proud owner of a Web company. At age 16, with classmate Cal Newport, he had founded the Web design shop Princeton Internet Solutions, which later changed its name to Princeton WebSolutions.

The company netted the two young men $40,000 during their senior year in high school, and they hoped to keep it going after they decamped for college by hiring a CEO to run the show while they were adjusting to campus life. The plan didn’t work. The CEO was not all they had hoped, and, says Simmons in an email communication, “The marketplace had become saturated with people offering website development. When the Internet bubble popped, fewer companies wanted web development. The ones that did wanted to pay less. With Cal and I at different colleges (Newport is at Dartmouth), we had difficulty communicating. Also our interests were changing.”

No matter, Simmons was hooked by the entrepreneurial life. Intoxicated with his first taste of life as the founder of a booming business, he has gone on to preach the gospel of business ownership. He is now a junior at the New York University Stern School of Business, is organizing an All-University Conference on Entrepreneurism, and is lobbying NYU administrators for an entrepreneurship track of study.

Meanwhile, Simons has just published The Student Success Manifesto: How to Create a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Prosperity. In it, he draws upon his experiences as an upper middle class student, as a business owner, and as a volunteer working with poor inner city youth. In his preface, he, like approximately 15 zillion students before him, rails against the structures of the classroom. There has to be a better road to success, he says, and then trots out statistics to prove that a number of people have found it.

Twenty percent of people who did not graduate from college earn more than college graduates.

Over 50 percent of all Fortune 500 CEOs had C or C- minus averages in college.

Sixty-five percent of U.S. presidents were in the lower half club in high school.

Over 50 percent of millionaire entrepreneurs never finished college.

There is no correlation between high SAT scores, good grades, and money, says Simmons, quoting Thomas Stanley’s book, The Millionaire Mind

Simmons may well have hit upon the hot topic of the early 21st century. He writes about the huge cost of paying personal dues in the form of loyalty to an employer, at a time when any number of workers – regardless of the color of their collars – are learning that bitter lesson via pink slip. He writes about the diminished power of credentials at a time when patent-holding telecom scientists are not only out of work, but are despairing of finding another job anytime soon – perhaps ever.

Simmons suggests that taking calculated risks, working primarily for passion rather than money, and racking up assets – tangible and intangible – is far superior to racking up years on the job. For a guy who was not old enough to enter a casino until this year, he is suggesting a wager that any number of laid-off wage slaves are bound to think is a good bet.