Amazing Success story #2 – Mark Bao
“I just try to think of myself as an entrepreneur who happens to be a teen.” – Mark Bao.
In case you haven’t yet heard of him, allow us to introduce you to young Mark Bao, owner of eleven companies and three foundations. When we say young…? We mean seventeen years old.
Let’s just pause for a second and think back to when you were seventeen. What was your biggest worry? Surely not paying salaries or tax? Your accounting and economics assignments were just practice, something to prepare you for the adult life.
For Mark Bao all of it was real. At seventeen he had already launched 11 web-based companies 3 of which he sold. Yes, forget about your high school fun run to raise money for the poor, Mark covered that base as well with his three non-profit foundations.
He grew up as an only child in Wellesley, Massachusetts after his parents decided to move from China to the States. We can deduce that young Mark grew up in a very hard working, curious and ambitious family with both of his parents being doctors researching cancer.
His stellar CV
Mark Bao developed a program on Visual Basic 6.0 which helped him with homework assignments; this was in the fifth grade. He copied this program onto floppy discs and sold them to his classmates.
In his first year in high school, while everyone else was worried about school dances and chemistry tests, he founded Debateware.com, an event management system for debate organizations.
Threewords.me is one of his more notable successes. This site allowed users to describe their friends on this site or on Twitter in three words. It sounds pretty simple yet this idea grew to 5 million visitors and 17 million page views. All this originated when Mark wanted to explore the process of acquiring customers through viral marketing.
He sold the site when he felt it distracted him from his other start-ups. Yes, he doesn’t quite think like the peers of his age. All of these online businesses have not, however, distracted him from living out a normal college life at Bentley University where he plays video games whenever he isn’t working on his next big start up.
Some examples of his other businesses include Classleaf, Genevine, Supportbreeze, Avecora and the surreptitious “Project Whiskey Town” which he describes as the revolution of the online restaurant reservation space.
It would suffice to say that Mark Bao has a very bright and successful future ahead of him. There is no slowing down for this outstanding entrepreneur and he makes for an exemplary role model to both teenagers and adults alike.
