JORDAN CASEY FIRST came to our attention last year as an incredibly composed 13-year-old entrepreneur pitching his company (yes, his own company) on RTÉ’s Junior Dragon’s Den.
Since then, the Waterford teenager has been on his travels, he tells TheJournal.ie.
He was invited to Apple and Google’s headquarters, spoke at the prestigious TEDxYouth conference in India, and met Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter.
Last May, he was a speaker at TieCon in Silicon Valley, California, one of the world’s largest conferences for entrepreneurs.
There, he says, he met Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, and “did some work with Adobe.” Haven’t we all.
‘The age thing can be a bit weird’
Now, the “founder, CEO, programmer and designer” of Casey Games, is appearing at the Dublin Web Summit, which takes place from 4-6 November.
Casey will be there as a mentor to 20 secondary school students taking part in Hatch, a workshop for young people with an interest in technology and programming.
All the applicants in the “incubator” had to be at least 16 years old.
Casey, their mentor, is 14.
“The age thing can be a bit weird,” he admits, but that won’t stop him participating in his second consecutive Web Summit.
He’s hugely enthusiastic about Hatch, as he is about anything that encourages young people to get involved in coding and programming.
[Coding] can be really intimidating when you first look at it, so you have to break it down, and start to learn the basic language.
It’s also really important that parents support their children in doing it, because they often don’t understand what it is.
The next level
At the Web Summit, Casey will also be unveiling what he calls “a new initiative for event managers”, which will do for them what the teenager did for teachers with TeachWare.
The web-based application to help teachers keep track of student profiles, classroom attendances, and exam results, forms part of the Casey Games portfolio, along with four games, including the hugely popular Alien Ball vs Humans.
And Casey Games is expanding.
The website says the company is undergoing a “massive rebranding”, something technology firms do all the time.
But the reason for the delay surely has to go down as a first for tech CEOs.
I’m taking some time out from it this year, so I can do my Junior Cert.
Then, he’ll consolidate the company, launch an expansion (starting with his soon-to-be announced application for event managers), and move into the next phase of Casey Games.
Then, I’ll do my Leaving Cert and finish secondary school, but I’m not sure about college.It depends on how things are going at that stage.
My dream would be to go somewhere with a good start-up situation, like London or maybe Dublin, and just do what I do.
Watch this space.
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