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MyWeboo: Third Start-Up Company for High School Senior


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Business Startup News: Diane Keng

If you haven't quite gotten your fill of feelings of inadequacy today, take a look at Diane Keng, who is on now her third start-up company, something the 18-year old must've worked on after Advanced Placement economics homework.

Instead of dozing off to droning English teachers, Ms. Keng was minding a booth at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, pitching her internet company, MyWeboo.com. Launched in March, it serves as a "catch-all" site, compiling profiles, text, photos and videos from various social networking sites like as Facebook. Co-founding MyWeboo with her older brother Steven, she is chief of marketing and operates out of their Cupertino house's garage.

Getting a taste of entrepreneurship already with her previous attempts, first selling t-shirts, then a teen-oriented marketing research firm, Keng is determined to make MyWeboo a success. Much more than a mild hobby this time around, her father and venture capitalist Brian Keng honed their business plan and invested $100,000 of his own money. Despite the growing crop of teen entrepreneurs, she admits to ABC that she kept her age on a don't ask, don't tell policy in order be taken seriously; "The thing is that you don't tell them that you're in high school until after they are impressed with you. That's kind of the idea, you walk in there and act like every other professional human being."

Being in Silicon Valley, Keng is hardly a gem in the rough as her high school alone is home to about 10 more entrepreneurs just like her. While she got lucky and has amazingly juggled a demanding academic schedule while still enjoying recreational hobbies like badminton, some did not have that luxury. Gurbaksh Chahal started his internet ad company Click Agents in San Jose when he was 16. While he did manage to sell it two years later for a cool $40 million, it cost him his entire high school experience as he dropped out to focus on his start-up ventures. "For the first two years that it took me from starting Click Agents to selling it, I basically sacrificed my youth," Chahal says. "I slept and worked in the office." All work and no play is clearly not an issue for him though, as he went on to start a new ad network, BlueLithium, which was sold for $300 million when he was 25.