An Interview with 19 Year Old Silcon Valley Company Chairmain and Author Ben Casnocha
Ben Casnocha is 19 years old. He is also the chairman and former CEO of Silicon Valley software company Comcate and the author of the recently published book My Start Up Life.
There are a few times in life when one person’s perspective can rock the foundation of what you believed to be possible. My 30 minute phone conversation with Ben had that very effect on me.
A little background on Ben: At the ripe ‘old’ age of 14 Ben and his friends arrived at a San Francisco 49ers game to find the seats very dirty. He wanted to lodge a formal complaint, but when he tried, he found that there was no infrastructure in place to handle such requests.
He was curious and began to investigate how government agencies organized and managed their communications. What he found was that unlike businesses that were already equip with highly developed CRM systems, government agencies were behind the times. This discovery led to the birth of Comcate, a company that creates and provides customized CRM software applications specifically for government agencies.
Like you probably do, I wanted to know how a 14 year old had the clarity and insight to realize such a hole in the marketplace and further, how over the past 5 years, he had grown the business into a successful venture which currently serves 75 local government agencies.
Like many of us who are driven to forge our own entrepreneurial paths, Ben showed an interest in business as a small child selling gumballs and pens around his house and neighborhood. But that’s about where the similarities end. What has separated Ben from the average entrepreneur still struggling to reach their goals is quite unexpected yet painfully obvious and based upon principals that any passionate entrepreneur can adopt.
Ben steered clear from giving ‘how to’ bullet points to others seeking success but instead offering several insightful processes by which others can discover their own path to success.
Seek out Mentors and Advisors
What strikes me as most interesting about Ben is his humility and his willingness to lend credit to the many intelligent people who have guided him along the path to success. These people haven’t wandered into his life by chance. He seeks them out and he doesn’t take mentor relationships lightly.
Before you start thinking about finding a mentor, you must first define your overall business philosophy and then ask yourself if you are willing to commit the time and energy necessary to building a long term relationship. Good mentors and advisors come from good relationships, and good relationships come from investing time.
Many success coaching books talk about the importance of mentors, but they often leave out the critical steps that lead up to a rewarding relationship. Ben says it’s not as hard as many think, but it’s also not as easy either.
Start by asking someone to have coffee or trade emails. You’ve got to take initiative. There are so many people who are willing to help but not many people willing to ask. However, it can take at least a year before you have a true mentoring relationship. You’ve got to be willing to invest the time and give back to the relationship as well.
Discover Your Own Path
The reason that Ben is hesitant to offer specific tidbits of advice is because he says advice is so easy to come by and that no one person’s advice will work for everyone.
During the past 6 months in book/publishing/advice industry, I’ve found that it’s easy to become a guru and an advice peddler. It’s easy to be confused about whose advice to listen to. The smartest thing someone can do is learning to discriminate.
He says that instead of taking one person’s advice literally, it’s more effective to soak in as much as possible and then step back and pause in reflection. Remember that you are your own person, not Jack Welch, not Donald Trump-you are who you are and what is important is to is to arrive at your own plan and your own strategy.
Cultivate a sense of introspection. Look at your own strengths and weakness from a third party perspective.
Luck
Many people would say that Ben is lucky. He was fortunate enough to grow up in one of the wealthiest cities on earth during a time when the technology revolution was in full swing. However, he says that luck is randomness and something that anyone can create more of in their life.
While his upbringing may have made opportunities more readily available, there is no reason why any person can not create opportunities for themselves by seeking out influential people, by expanding there perspective by visiting new places, and by experiencing new things. In short, invite more randomness into your life.
You must do what you can to create more luck by exposing yourself to more people, more places, and more ideas on a continual basis.
Becoming an Author
Now in addition to being a 19 year old chairman and former CEO, Ben is the author of a book published by Wiley Press. He chose Wiley not only for its reputation, but because the publisher promised to take the book to print quickly a very important selling point considering that Ben is taking a year off between high school in college.
That year off involves a jam-packed schedule of appearances from lectures, to book expos, to publishing conferences.
I don’t know about you, but I’m purchasing this book right away. If you’re not convinced yet, just read some of the reviews. Ben is not only a 19 year old whiz kid with a string of successes, his insight spans far beyond his years.
Within his story, you may just discover what I did during our phone conversation, that there are endless possibilities just waiting to be discovered if you will only go out and find them.
Every Tuesday, we feature someone in a NON-sponsored interview like you just read above. You can learn more about “Interview Me” by reading this page. If you would like to recommend someone (including yourself) to be featured, please e-mail Christine [at] Create Business Growth [dot] com and tell us the WHY behind your recommendation.
July 03 2007 02:00 am | Interviews
Vern at Aim for Awesome on 03 Jul 2007 at 4:43 am #
Wow, this kid’s got it whatever “it” is. When I was 14 I was drinking beer in the basement of a bar that was serving us kids in a hodink town in Pennsylvania. At 19 I was in the USAirForce and chasing skirts in Honolulu. Only recently did I grow up enough to start thinking about the future. I’ll get the book!
Christine on 03 Jul 2007 at 9:40 am #
I hear ya Vern! My goals at 14 were not so ambitious and also involved drinking beer in a basement.
It seems from your ‘About’ page that you have something that much of the world is severely lacking, and that is a sense of humor and the insight to realize that we really should be having more fun in life.
Andrew Kaplan on 03 Jul 2007 at 6:20 pm #
Nice story…I had one of my mentors who was very similar, Bob Pittman…he was running an NBC radio station in Pittsburgh at age 19, Chicago at age 21, NBC flagship in NY at age 23 and helped create MTV at age 25. I had the good fortune to work with him when I was at NBC in NY and at MTV’s sister network called “The Movie Channel”, where we were actually running the channel…some of the young people I worked with at that time became Chairman and CEO’s at those channels, and one went on to produce major motion pictures. None of them went back to get their MBA’s….
So when you look at college and people who did not finish, such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Bob Pittman.. you must ask yourself…where do you want to spend those 4 years..if you really love business. Are those Ben’s role models?
Christine on 03 Jul 2007 at 6:32 pm #
Wow. That is incredible. You are “lucky” to have such an incredible person as a mentor.
I agree with you completely about the degree. Though I have a college degree, I am a firm believer that a degree means very little in terms of how successful you can become. In some ways, I think it actually stifled my creativity.
Thanks for sharing your story!
Andy on 05 Jul 2007 at 9:07 pm #
Fantastic interview, and I’m sure you gained a lot by talking to a guru like Ben! Definitely something special about a person who has achieved this much at 19
Christine on 06 Jul 2007 at 11:27 am #
Yes Andy – He really is an interesting person with a great deal of wisdom. If he has achieved this much at 19… imagine him at 30! His story is certainly an inspiration.
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