An Entrepreneurial Prodigy

Rob Walker's column in today's New York Times Magazine describes a clever business called Quirky. For a $99 fee, Quirky lets users submit product ideas. The Quirky community votes on them, and the Quirky team manufactures the winning idea, after taking into account input from the community. The inventor earns a licensing fee, and community members who made valuable contributions to the design earn a small fee as well. Below is a video from Quirky's site in which Ben Kaufman, its 22-year old founder, describes how he started his first company (Quirky is his third) with $185k of seed money his parents got from re-mortgaging their house, and how his first two companies gave him the idea to start Quirky.