Teen's Cold Calls Fund House

A story about how Garry Tan started his entrepreneurial journey at 14 by cold-calling businesses from the Yellow Pages to offer web design services, eventually earning enough to help his family move from an apartment to a house.

"We grew up sometimes food insecure. My dad was a foreman in a machine shop and my mom was a home health aide and certified nursing assistant at convalescent homes. She worked 2 jobs. My brother and I lived in apartments in Fremont in the Bay Area, sort of in the shadow of Silicon Valley.

My dad was actually an engineer but didn't have the EQ to hold onto jobs and struggled with alcoholism, so he was always losing his job. We never had money around. But he did invest in computers - our first computer was an IBM PCXT.

I started winning some awards for web design as a kid in junior high. I started an underground newspaper with my friends and we learned how to make a website for it. We called it an online zine. Thousands of people would find it off of Usenet newsgroups. People would write letters to the editor like we were a legitimate publication - they didn't know we were 14.

I got really addicted to the internet and thought maybe I could make money. Back then there was the Yellow Pages that they'd throw on your doorstep. I started cold calling businesses asking if they'd hire me to make web pages. I ended up getting a job riding my bike to the local web design firm that made city websites for Pleasanton, Fremont, and San Jose. They paid me $7.10 an hour to work on graphic design and HTML.

I helped my parents with the down payment on our first house in Fremont. My parents still live in that home - I'm helping them remodel it right now."