Rishi Kacker and Matt Pauker are the two founders of Voltage, Voltage makes security software that can encrypt documents, files, and e-mails at the touch of a button.

The two 25 years old started it a a summer research project while at Stanford studying using the basement office in the engineering building as their office before entering their business plan into a competition, A competition which they won.

They both has both graduated, In 2002, Rishi graduated from Stanford with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Rishi also studied economics and finance while working towards a Masters in Management Science and Engineering. Matt received his B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford that same year.

While at Stanford, Rishi helped build the Scribe E-mail System, a research project designed to deploy a complete secure email solution and was also involved in a strategic planning venture, teaching of computer science, and in the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES)

Matt was responsible for driving its technical vision and architecture. He currently manages the Voltage SecureData product line and Voltage’s key management platform, used by the world’s largest enterprises and software companies to secure their most sensitive data.

The company currently has around 75 employees and 130 big-business customers .

Aodhan Cullen is the founder of statcounter, a free online visitor stats tool he founded in 1999, It offers its members the chance to grow and improve their online businesses by allowing them to monitor the number of hits to their website; the geographical location of visitors; the various pages a visitor views; keywords used to find the site plus other features.

He now 27 years old founder founded the company when he was 16, but it was way back before then that he started his entrepreneurial life, at 12 he started first business, a résumé-typing service.
He then moved onto designing Web pages for paying clients, who often wanted to know how many people were visiting their sites.

Until at 16, he stumbled unto his current business/idea statcounter and now the rest of the story lies with
him in Ireland.

StatCounter currently has over 1.5 million users and tracks more than 9 billion page views per month across its network of 2.2 million Web sites.

Cullen currently resides in Ireland with his wife Jenni.

Alexander is the 25 years old entrepreneur and founder of imageshack, a free image hosting website. The site was launched in in November 2003.

Three years ago, Levin got the idea for ImageShack as a senior in high school while chatting in online message boards. He noticed a need for a place to store and share images separate from the forums, which didn’t provide enough storage space. With a bit of work, ImageShack was born.

In 2008, ImageShack also raised $15 million from Sequoia Capital aid to help better the media hosting site’s quality of service.

Imageshack also launched a image sharing tool called yfrog something very similar to twitpic to share online photos on twitter.

Daniel Ek is the 27 years old serial entrepreneur behind spotify, a legal music service he founded with Martin Lorentzon that helps people discover, browse and play music.. He started his first company at the young age of 14 in 1997 and soon joined the IT Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg at age of 15.

Prior to Spotify Daniel founded Advertigo, the advertising company acquired by TradeDoubler and has been a part of the Nordic auction company Tradera (acquired by Ebay) and Evertigo. Daniel’s previous jobs include CTO at Jajja Communications, CTO at Stardoll and CEO of µTorrent, the worlds most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads.

Daniel signed a contract on behalf of Spotify with 7digital music service in 2009, allowing Spotify users to purchase tracks.

Daniel also stated that Spotify was founded as a reaction to the decline of the music industry. “People listen to more music than ever, from a bigger diversity of artists he said”. The underlying business has changed from being about ownership to an access model. Spotify facilitates that by offering a service in the cloud.

In his interview with telegraph he said “”The music industry is currently worth $17bn (£10.8bn); it’s going to be $40bn or $50bn soon. There will only be four or five players left in a few years,” he says. “If that’s the case, we will end up with a company worth tens of billions.”

Currently over seven million people have signed up to the website, 250,000 have signed up to the premium service, which costs £9.99 a month in the UK and currently the service make tons of millions of euros each year from advertisers.

Amie Street is an indie online music store and social network service created in 2006 by Brown University seniors Elliott Breece, Elias Roman, and Joshua Boltuch, in Providence, Rhode Island.

They have since graduated and moved the company to Long Island City in Queens, New York.
Their vision for Amie Street is to become “the most fun way to discover and buy music online”, keep music social, and support the artists

Founded in early 2006, Amie Street opened to the public with a pre-alpha version on July 4, 2006

They began negotiations for the round in January 2007. Notable angel investors include Robin Richards, former president of MP3.com and David Hirsch, director of Google’s B2B vertical markets group

Amie Street uses an algorithm to determine song prices based on demand. The price for a track starts at zero when a song is uploaded onto the site. It then rises according to the increased demand and purchase of the song. The maximum price any song will rise to is 98¢

Artists can upload their music directly to the site in MP3 format at whatever quality bit rate they choose, but when a record label or music distributor requires Amie Street to encode the music, they strive to achieve an average bit rate of 256 kbit/s using a variable bitrate.

As users buy songs, the artist is credited quarterly. Artists keep 70% of the proceeds after US$5 in sales for each song
SIMPLE!

Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc (EMG), a Gainesville, FL company. EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida undergrad students(Sam Tarantino,Josh Greenberg and Andres Barreto)

Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service.
Sam and Josh has since then pursued the business, taking a leave of absence from the University of Florida.

Grooveshark is now a web-based music application built for anyone on the internet to listen to music on-demand at no charge.

They also have cool features such as the Twitter-like social feature allows users to “follow” each other to make it easier to share songs by clicking a special heart icon which adds it to the logged-in user’s list of favorite users.

They’ve signed deals with more than 600 record labels that have allowed their music to be sold through the network.

Tarantino says Grooveshark now has 23 full-time employees.

Grooveshark currently streams between 50 to 60 million songs per month, to more than 400,000 users.
Although they will need to sort out their issues with copyright and stop getting sued, Maybe the new partnership with EMI just might do the deal.

Anthony Volodkin is the 23 years old founder of The Hype Machine, A site he started back in 2005 during his sophomore year at Hunter College studying computer science on a full scholarship.

Volodkin’s parents emigrated from Moscow to Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay when he was 12

He started up the site when he realised he no longer trusted magazines or radio to recommend him great new music, so decided to automate the music discovery process by indexing the world’s best music blogs and posting the most popular content to his site.

The Hype Machine is a website which aggregates the most popular songs on mp3 blogs, allowing users to discover new music every day.

Anthony who had been working part-time as an IT Consultant, decided to pour his energy into something that he said “left a lasting mark”.

The site currently gets 1.5 million visitors per month from all over the world and we have over 100,000 registered users.

In January 2010, The Hype Machine partnered with SoundCloud, allowing labels to provide music bloggers with new and pre-released tracks. The Hype Machine also revealed plans to release an iPhone application

It has been profiled by CNN, Wired, and The Guardian. It was named to The Guardian’s list of 100 essential websites of 2009, one of four music-oriented sites to receive mention.

Fred Wilson called the site “the best thing to happen to music since the Rolling Stones” and the “Technorati for music”.

Gawker Media founder Nick Denton called the site “the future of all media”.The site has been criticized for providing internet users with easier access to free music.

Blake Ross is the 24 years old American software developer best known for his work on the Mozilla web browser Firefox.

He started the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt, He created his first website at the age of 10, Blake who was Born in Miami, Florida was still programming whilst in school and soon after Netscape became open-source, he began contributing to the platform.

He worked as an intern at Netscape Communications Corporation at the age of 15, while attending high school at Gulliver Preparatory School and after graduating in 2003, He started in Stanford university but decided to take a leave of absence due to the workload of his project.

During his time interning at Netscape, he was disappointed with the browser he was working with, during the time which netscape was recently purchased by America Online.

But Ross and Hyatt wanted to change the way browser operated and was used, he wanted a smaller, easy to use browser and it been open source made it more interesting especially growth-wise.

At 19, November 2004, Firefox was released and quickly caused problems to Microsoft as they were a huge decline in the amount of people using its internet explorer.

Firefox had over 100 million downloads in less than a year and now Web surfers are switching to Firefox at the rate of 7 million a month.

Currently, he is a Director of Product at Facebook and currently resides in nearby Mountain View, California.

He also spends most of his time on his new startup Parakey with another ex-netscape employee Joe hewitt, a new user interface designed to bridge the gap between the desktop and the web.

On July 20, 2007 the BBC reported that Facebook had purchased Parakey.

Jon Wheatley is a 22 years old entrepreneur, born and raised in London.

His first breakthrough came at age 17, when onlinegames.net was acquired for what was (at the time) a non-trivial amount of money(Believed to be around $70,000)

And since then he has continued working on different kinds of project including social music website moof.com, screenshot sharing mac application grabup.com.

He claims to have been working on the internet for over 10 years.

He then started a photoblogging website designed for users to take a photo of themselves every day called Dailybooth.

DailyBooth is similar to the micro-messaging site twiiter in that users can choose to follow others, and it has adopted the “@” reply function. Twitter is a prime driver of traffic to DailyBooth, according to Wheatley, as users can tweet links to their photos on the DailyBooth site.

Dailybooth is funded by the startup funding firm, Y Combinator

DailyBooth was founded and opened in February 2009 and within four days, they got 3,000 signups after he tweeted about it after they launched.

Do you think you will signing up anytime soon.

Hey Guys, Today i have a young entrepreneur who decided to take his love for yoyo and turn it into a business, this just means you can pretty much find a way in turning your hobby into a business or something profitable.

Enjoy

Hello Mike, How are you doing today?

I’m doing great! I’m getting really close to releasing my company’s new yo-yo the BassBoost for pre-ordering.

Can you please give us some background information about yourself?

I’m a pure-bred entrepreneur through and through, I’ve been into creating money by providing value since I was in my early teens. I’ve been yo-yoing since I was 13 and have now built my company into a yo-yo company.

Tell us about your companies? What inspired you to start them and what do you do there?

I own two companies, the first one I started is called Montgomery Enterprises LLC, its the umbrella to all my other projects. The only thing I do under that name is vending machines, of which I have three around my home town. My main focus is Double-Take Industries, which originally started as a humorous t-shirt company; I recently transitioned it into a yo-yo company by publishing a book on how to yo-yo called Learn to Throw (which is part of a 5 book course I’m still writing) and by manufacturing an aluminium, competition grade yo-yo called the BassBoost. I started DTI because I wanted to make funny shirts and have a way to raise funds to support local causes I believed in, now I use it to support the yo-yoing community.

How did you raise capital for your business?

As a general rule I’ve always used part time employment to raise funds for my projects, however a year into developing DTI I did get an investment from my grandparents to acquire screen printing equipment to reduce costs.

Describe/outline your typical day?

Wake up, shower, eat/drink coffee, get on the computer, check emails, check social sites/forums, read/write blogs, eat lunch, drive to town for errands/work, return home, recheck computer stuff, read 30min-1hr of books, work on DTI, practice yo-yoing for 1-2hrs (usually scattered throughout the day), eat dinner, go to sleep.

Do you have a favourite business tool or resource?

I like reading business books and watching video blogs by Gary Vaynerchuk to get motivated.

How many hours do you work a day on average?

Hard to say, I scatter work and play throughout the day.

What qualities have you developed as a result of running your business?

I’ve gotten very social because of my business, I’ve met a lot of cool people, role models, and mentors. I’ve gotten really good at conveying thoughts concisely and lately have gotten pretty good at teaching others through video blogs.

In your opinion, what is the most important quality an entrepreneur should possess?

An insatiable thirst for knowledge and experience

How do you go about marketing your business? What has been your most successful form of marketing?

I market by not marketing. I connect with people on a personal level and get to know them without any intention of ever selling to them (something I’ve learned from the Go-Giver). I use social media to make this easier on me and it’s paying off. If they ask about my business I’ll tell them but for the most part I like to let people find me by word of mouth. Occasionally I’ll use forums to spread the word about a new blog but I never spread the word about something I’m selling in that way, if I go through the trouble of posting to 5 different web forums in hopes of getting views it will be about something that is valuable and free for the viewer.

Do you have any personal experience that has changed your life?

I had an opportunity last year to go on a tour with a handful of entrepreneurs to meet the author of the Go-Giver (Bob Burg) at his event in Florida called Extreme Business Makeover. Because of that I’ve been connected to many amazing people and have learned so much about the power of social media to connect talented people from around the world who otherwise would have no knowledge of each other.

How far are you willing to go to succeed?

Hard question to answer, I do what needs to be done to finish a project.

How do you define success?

To me success is learning from whatever life throws at me, regardless of a project being completed successfully or failing, as long as I learn from the situation and grow because of it; that’s a success in my book.

What advices would like to give to young entrepreneurs starting their business?

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and to work in a group. Learn from those who have achieved something you want to achieve and ignore those who give advice or try to discourage you. Read the Go-Giver, Crush It!, the Four Hr. Work Week, If you think you can, you can!, and Rich Dad Poor Dad and keep an open mind about what you take in. You don’t have to use everything you learn, but definitely take the time and keep an open mind about the information; you CAN and should adapt it to fit your lifestyle. And remember to have fun with it! If you can build a business around your passion you’ll have a hard time losing your motivation to continue.

Thanks for your time Mike

Connect with Mike on his website and twitter