This weekend I went to the Teens In Tech conference, which was organized by 16-year-old Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky. I brought Ypulse Youth Advisory Board member Enrique along with me (look for his post tomorrow) but still felt old, especially when one of the 25-year-old speakers said he felt old (I guess that makes me ancient). The event was a mix of curious adults and teen tech entrepreneurs — the focus was really about what it takes to be a teen entrepreneur in the adult world of business.

You know you're at a teen-run event when the organizer asks his mom if lunch is ready for attendees, presenters use words like "retarded" and throw in an expletive or two, and a panel on teen developers ends up being about how and if these guys (since the panel was all dudes – where were the girl geeks??) are able to meet and date girls. That said, I was really impressed by some of the young presenters including internshipIN.com founder Jessica Mah and Digg designer Danny Trinh. For those of you following me on Twitter, you may know I am working on launching a Ypulse podcast. In that spirit, I borrowed my husband's little Olympus voice recorder and interviewed both Jessica and Danny. Hopefully you'll hear some of that later. Both Jessica and Danny talked about Facebook as a brand/site that gets it right when it comes to youth (Danny attributes the teen exodus from MySpace to Facebook to user interface, clean design and functionality).

My biggest take away from the event was that while this generation may have grown up using digital tools to socialize and create content, it takes a special breed of teen to really become a full blown entrepreneur — incredibly driven and thick-skinned. Jessica told me most of her friends are intimidated by technology and starting things (i.e. coding), and that she doesn't know that many teen entrepreneurs. Danny comically advised the teens in the audience to basically "be teens," explaining that teens who hang around with adults at events or in the business world all the time can come off as kinda "creepy" to their teenage peers. This theme continued with a debate over whether dropping out of school to start a business was "awesome" or shortsighted. Becoming an entrepreneur means both freedom from traditional structures but also a lack of freedom when it comes to how much free time these teens have to sacrifice and what gets pushed aside (schoolwork, football games, proms, etc.).

Daniel showed a cool stat-oriented video at the beginning of the event to set up how technology has transformed his generation and shared it online.

Definitely check out the Teens In Tech community to find these extraordinary teens who code, blog, podcast and run online or mobile companies as well as those who spoke at the event. It was great to hear that 2007 Mashup alum Martina Butler is using the money she makes from her podcast Emo Girl Talk to put herself through college!

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