I-CAMP is a summer and after-school non-profit program where young people (11 - 17 years old) will learn entrepreneurial skills including how to develop mobile apps. I-CAMP will focus on two of the most important skills that lead to entrepreneurial success, programming skills and intuition skills. At least half the spaces will be reserved for girls.

I-CAMP will start as an after-school program in Santa Monica, CA beginning in September 2012. 

The cost of the after-school program is $100 per week.

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build you own things that other people can use. Once you learn that you’ll never be the same again. ~ Steve Jobs (http://youtu.be/UvEiSa6_EPA)

I-CAMP will be featured in The NeXT Steve Jobs Will Be A Woman, a documentary about women equality, tech entrepreneurship and education. If we want more women in technology, we have to plant the proper seeds. We have to inspire the idea in young girls.

According to a TED talk given by Ken Robinson, "All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.... We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."

Sugata Mitra’s work with self organized learning by children shows that groups of children can learn to use computers and the Internet to answer almost any question. This happens everywhere and is independent of what language they speak, where they live and how rich or poor they are. All they need is free access and the liberty to work in unsupervised groups. The most effective group size seems to be 4-5 children. In this video, Mitra talks about his academic experiments that he conducted in India and England. At I-CAMP, we will be adopting the method of self organized learning to entrepreneurial skills. They will also learn from entrepreneurs including the lecturers below.

There is a 14 year old in Utah who created a number 1 iPhone game using Corona SDK called Bubble Ball that so far has been downloaded over 9 million times. Click here to watch a Good Morning American segment about him. At I-CAMP we will also be using Corona SDK, so there is no reason why young people from Los Angeles and Mount Vernon cannot accomplish something similar.

Angry Birds has been downloaded over 500 million times, 6.5 million people downloaded it on Christmas day alone. During the first week, I-CAMPers will build an Angry Birds clone. The top-grossing apps like Angry Birds are making $3 million a month.

I-CAMPers will learn entrepreneurial concepts such as business models and customer development.

I-CAMPers will also learn where good ideas come from; the keys to marketing are thought leadership and great storytelling; the art of success consciousness; how to increase their wealth and improve their health; why entrepreneurs need to study the arts; and the health and creativity benefits of walking.

I-CAMP is a place to develop relationships, according to Paul Graham, a co-founder of the seed-stage startup funding firm Y Combinator:

Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong. They must genuinely like one another, and work well together. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.

In Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. Many major tech success story proves that Gladwell is correct. Start working on your 10,000 hours now.

Bill Gates is the chairman and co-founder of Microsoft. He ls one of the wealthiest people in world with a net worth of over $50 billion. He was doing real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968. In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time, which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.

Apple, the world's most valuable company, was co-founded in 1976 by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak's passion for electronics developed in 4th grade, when his father, an engineer for Lockheed, guided him into some science fair projects. Crazy about mathematics Woz earned his HAM radio license by 6th grade and by the time he reached college was designing and building whole computers. Wozniak was the primary developer of the Apple II and in December 1984, the Apple II accounted for 70% of Apple's revenue.

Mark Zuckerberg is the president and CEO of Facebook. In 2008, he was named the youngest billionaire in the world. He began using computers and writing software as a child in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately.

Oracle is the third largest software company behind Microsoft and IBM. Lotus Development Corporation was once the largest software company. The initial major product of both Oracle and Lotus were essentially coded by one great programmer at each company, Bob Miner at Oracle and Jonathan Sachs at Lotus. 

Steve Jobs explained why the 10,000-Hour Rule pays off so well in the software industry: "The difference between the best worker on computer hard-ware and the average may be 2 to 1, if you're lucky. With automobiles, maybe 2 to 1. But in software, it's at least 25 to 1. The difference between the average programmer and a great one is at least that... The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when you're in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay off."

Intuition is another powerful force that leads to entrepreneurial success. This is the route of Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, and Andrew Mason of Groupon. An August 2004 Fast Company article about Jeff Bezos:

What really distinguishes Bezos is his harrowing leaps of faith. His best decisions can't be backed up by studies or spreadsheets. He makes nervy gambles on ideas that are just too big and too audacious and too long-term to try out reliably in small-scale tests before charging in. He has introduced innovations that have measurably hurt Amazon's sales and profits, at least in the short run, but he's always driven by the belief that what's good for the customer will ultimately turn out to be in the company's enlightened self-interest.

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, "I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis." He also said that "intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work."

Page and Brin both attended Montessori schools. Montessori schools emphasize a Constructivism or "discovery" model, where students learn concepts from working with materials, rather than by direct instruction. Andrew Mason was a music major at Northwestern, studied public policy at the University of Chicago, and his first attempt at Internet entrepreneurship was a social initiatives platform called The Point.

Intuition is also dependent on the 10,000-Hour Rule. Steve Jobs ideas were mostly failures until his return to Apple in 1996. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 when he was 30 and Amazon didn't post its first profit until the 4th quarter of 2001.

Intuition is a skill that can be developed. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman presents our thinking process as consisting of two systems. System 1 (Thinking Fast) is unconscious, intuitive and effort-free. System 2 (Thinking Slow) is conscious, uses deductive reasoning and is an awful lot of work. System 2 likes to think it is in charge but it’s really the irrepressible System 1 that runs the show. Kahneman writes about the remarkable accomplishment of “expert intuition”, in which after much practice a trained expert, such as a doctor or a firefighter, can unconsciously produce the right response to complex problems.

According to Larry Page, the CEO of Google, the historic technology boom is an opportunity to excel individually and to improve the conditions of the planet at large. Those who fail to do so are shamelessly squandering the opportunity. To Page, the only true failure is not attempting the audacious. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.”

"Will Your Child be the Next Gates, Jobs or Zuckerberg, or Working at Wal-Mart?"

We are accepting deposits on a first come, first serve basis for 20 seats. If you would like to save a seat for your child this September, make a $100 deposit by clicking the "Donate" button below. Deposits are refundable.

I-CAMP Main Facilitator: Terrance Jackson