By Alison van Diggelen
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Catherine Cook was a big draw at SDForum’s Tech Titans of Tomorrow: Teens Plugged In Conference last Wednesday at the Hewlett Packard Auditorium in Palo Alto. She is cofounder of MyYearbook a social media network for teens which has raised almost $17 million in funding. She talked to me about the site’s Causes Application which allows users to donate money to charities with their virtual currency, Lunch Money.
Catherine told me teens are choosing to go greenand make a big difference to our planet. To date, MyYearbook users (reportedly 10 million of them) have bought 2 million pounds of carbon-dioxide offsets and saved millions of sqft of rainforest.
We also talked about the challenge of funding a company when you’re only 16 (!) and she issued a challenge to would-be entrepreneurs with hot ideas:
“A great idea is worthless if you don’t act on it,” says Catherine Cook, now 19.
The interview was recorded in Palo Alto on May 13, 2009
