IT’S THE STUFF of entrepreneurial legend: In 2007, at just 23 years old, Mark Zuckerberg became one of the youngest billionaires in the world on the back of Facebook, a product he built in a dorm room.
And when he rang in his 31st birthday this past May, Zuckerberg’s shares of Facebook were worth over $9 billion.
Zuckerberg is definitely an outlier here, but there are plenty of young entrepreneurs around the world building tech companies and finding their own success.
Here are other young tech prodigies around the world everyone should know.
Russia: Pavel Durov (30), cofounder of social network VK
Pavel Durov has been called the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia”, since his social network, VK, overtook Facebook in his home country.
Unfortunately, he was forced to flee Russia late last year, claiming the government was trying to take control of his company.
Now he has a new messaging app called Telegram.
Ireland: Patrick and John Collison, 26 and 24, co-founded Stripe
Brothers Patrick and John Collison have been called the “Mark Zuckerbergs of Ireland” thanks to the success of their payments startup Stripe — even though they live in Silicon Valley now.
Stripe recently cut a deal to power ApplePay, and it’s worth $5 billion.
Singapore: Quek Siu Rui (28) cofounded sales app Carousell.
Quek Siu Rui, 28, dropped out of grad school to cofound Carousell, a person-to-person sales app that’s gaining mega traction in Singapore.
Japan: Yoshikazu Tanaka founded social network SNS Gree
Yoshikazu Tanaka started his social network, SNS Gree, as a lark at the age of 26. In 2010, not long after he turned 33, he became the youngest-ever founder of a company listed on the front section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
His net worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.
Canada: Michael Litt, 28, co-founder of Vidyard
Michael Litt cofounded video-marketing startup Vidyard in 2010 as part of a final-year project at the University of Waterloo.
Today, Vidyard has graduated from the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator program and is ranked as one of Canada’s top startups. It has raised nearly $26 million.
Sweden: Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek
Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek is worth $400 million at age 32 — and it’s not even his first company.
Ek has sold his previous startups to companies like TradeDoubler and eBay.
Brazil: Gustavo Caetano, 33, founded Samba Tech
Gustavo Caetano, 33, took a struggling mobile-game-distribution company he founded in 2004 and turned it into Samba Tech, now Latin America’s biggest online video platform.
Kenya: Mubarak Muyika (20) sold his first company for six figures when he was 16.
Mubarak Muyika, 20, is the CEO of Zagace, a Kenyan startup that makes business software. And when he was 16, he founded Hypecentury Technologies, a web-hosting company that he sold in a six-figure deal.
In fact, he turned down a generous scholarship to Harvard to pursue entrepreneurship.
India: Deepak Ravindran, 27, founded mobile-search company Innoz
In 2008, Deepak Ravindran and three of his fellow students dropped out of Kannur University to found Innoz, a company that lets users do Google and Wikipedia searches via text message — crucial in India, since mobile internet is way less common.
Last year, Ravindran left Innoz to found Lookup, a service for mobile users to chat with local businesses.
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