I
t’s a familiar story: yet another San Francisco-based entrepreneur ends up creating a unicorn startup before the age of 35. What is not so familiar is that this entrepreneur’s main challenge was not being allowed to hire anyone, nor being permitted to ask for a loan. Why? Because he was a teenager.
When he was 16, Javier Agüera (now 24) co-invented the Geeksphone, which claimed to be the first Android-powered handset that allows the user to modify operating system components without having to root the device first. At the age of 19 he already had three startups behind him and was considered by MIT Technology Review one of the Innovators Under 35 in Spain.
