All over the news this week has been Nick D’Aloisio’s entry into that exclusive club of teenage tech entrepreneurs and multimillionaires, joining the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Shawn Fanning. He’s recently sold his mobile app ‘Summly’ to Yahoo for an estimated £18 million at the tender age of 17, and has secured himself a job with them in the process. Now, it’s not a strategy that many of us can emulate, not many can work a full time job whilst studying for A-Levels and working towards a place at Oxford University all at the same time, but it is an inspiring story nonetheless.
D’Aloisio’s story, like Zuckerberg and Fanning’s, makes it look easy, and maybe it was, but many people still shy away from the more ‘techy’ aspects of business. It’s a shame because the most common conversation the Freshminds team have with many businesses is; how can I find people who combine great commercial awareness and brilliant communication skills with tech understanding? Do people exist who have both sides of the spectrum
You can make yourself very attractive to a lot of businesses by increasing your tech savvyness. Here’s my guide to bringing out the D’Aloisio/Zuckerberg/Fanning in you:
Be curious.
Constantly ask questions about how things work, what’s new and what’s upcoming. And Google it.
Subscribe to a news feed.
To give yourself a decent understanding of what’s going on in the field, you can do a lot worse than subscribing to a tech news feed like BBC, Yahoo, The Guardian or Reuters.
Start a blog.
Blogs are super-easy to set up with the likes of WordPress or Blogger and give you a practical outlet for your budding techy capabilities.
Teach yourself programming.
This is for the serious among you, but there are books and online tools galore for those of you driven enough to pull a D’Aloisio and teach yourself the knowledge.
Take a Decoded course.
If motivating yourself to do it off your own back is too much, then you could take a course with Decoded to learn how to code and give yourself a head start.
Join a network.
Get in touch with like-minded people, go along to events like Tech Meetups or discover your own through Eventbrite and the like.
It’s an exciting world out there, good luck embracing the technology entrepreneur in you, and remember, even if we can't all be the Zuckerberg and D'Aloisio's of this world, we can always get better.
