MADRID — When Jordan Casey took to the stage to present his technology business, he jumped onto the platform rather than walking up the access ramp.
Entrepreneurial energy? Yes, but also adolescent enthusiasm.
Mr. Casey, keynote speaker at a conference here this past week on European youth in business, turned 15 in November. He has often been reported to be Europe’s youngest chief executive, a status that among other honors has won him invitations to meet European Union economic officials in Brussels.
“I feel I’ve got a head start,” Mr. Casey told the audience here, a group of 200 or so teenage achievers, some of them intent on breaking through what many consider European obstacles to business. “In 10 years, I will be 25 and I will already have 13 years of experience working in the industry, so that is kind of cool.”
Potential hurdles to the young and business-minded that were discussed during the three-day conference were a rigid education system in many of the European Union’s 28 countries; a cultural aversion to risk-taking in some parts of the region; and a stagnant economy in which youth unemployment is a pressing social problem. The role of speakers like Mr. Casey was to provide can-do pep talks.
“I don’t know if I’m still Europe’s youngest chief executive, but I certainly feel I’ve got a head start,” Mr. Casey said later in an interview. “I can’t be doing as much work as I like to, because I sort of have to go to school as well, play football and be a kid.”
Mr. Casey, from Waterford, Ireland, is a software developer.
He started computer programming when he was 9. He then developed a game called Alien Ball vs. Humans that topped the charts in the Apple Store in Ireland. In 2012, he registered his first company, Casey Games, with a staff of two “who also didn’t find it easy to work because of all the school exams,” he said. Since then, he has launched two business apps, one for teachers and another for event organizers, while continuing to attend high school in Waterford.
Notably, one prospect the precocious entrepreneur does not find enticing is attending college.
“I really don’t see what university could teach me that I can’t learn for free immediately,” he said. “There are a lot of skills that you can learn yourself and just by using the Internet.”
In the United States, the lore of the tech industry has its many teen touchstones — whether Steve Jobs founding Apple in his parents’ garage at 19, or the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg starting his first software-based company while still in high school.
But in Europe, young people with the brains and DNA to build businesses from an early age do not often see or seize the opportunities the way Jordan Casey has — or the way Nick D’Aloisio did.
Mr. D’Aloisio was still a 17-year-old British student in 2013 when he sold his news-reading app, Summly, to Yahoo for what some reports said was as much as $30 million.
One of the young Spanish entrepreneurs addressing the conference, Luis Iván Cuende, 19, argued that Spain’s oppressively high youth unemployment — 52 percent at the end of 2014 — is “because of the enormous gap between our rigid and theoretical education system and the labor market, which means you come out of many years at school without a clue about the outside world.”
Mr. Cuende, who started programing on his own when he was 12, complained in an interview that Spain’s education system was run by “people stuck in the past.” He recalled that the technology course he took in high school in Oviedo, was given by “a teacher who knew nothing about computing and was about to retire.”
Mr. Cuende plans to roll out next month Stampery, an online copyright certification system that will use technology similar to that of the Bitcoin payment system. “What I most enjoy is just to develop a product,” Mr. Cuende said.
But he acknowledged a missed opportunity. He still keeps on his phone a one-line text message — “you should come work with us” — that he received in November 2013 from Jan Koum, the Ukrainian-born American who was a co-founder of WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application.
The company was acquired by Facebook a few months later. “I turned down his offer, but since his company then got sold for $19 billion and every employee held some options, it’s a bit painful to think about that decision,” Mr. Cuende said.
Endesa, a Spanish utility, was among the sponsors of the Madrid conference. Federico Fea, the company’s chief innovation officer, said he wanted to start recruiting to his team employees “just based on talent,” independent of age or whether they have a college education.
Endesa employs 10,500 people in Spain, a majority of whom are from 45 to 54 years old. Given the high unemployment in Spain and the region generally — nearly 10 percent for the European Union over all — “Europe needs to become more flexible in its approach to the labor market,” Mr. Fea said.
The American tech sector has started thinking likewise. In some parts of Google, for instance, as many as 14 percent of employees do not have college degrees.
Mr. Fea said that in terms of promoting entrepreneurship, though, Europe’s biggest hurdle was not structural but instead “our incredible fear of failure,” particularly in southern countries like Spain and Italy. In the United States, he said, “you’re nobody until you have failed once or twice.”
The European Union is not a monolith, of course. So entrepreneurial attitudes and opportunities vary.
Eiso Kant, a 24-year-old Dutch entrepreneur — a veteran, by the conference’s standards — has settled in Madrid. He initially came to study at its IE University, but then started Tyba, an online job recruitment platform focused on start-up companies. “The Netherlands is a country where entrepreneurship has always been promoted, while in Spain it has only now started to become a celebrated endeavor,” Mr. Kant said, on the conference’s sidelines.
Aya Jaff, a 19-year-old, Iraqi-born German, set up an association to teach coding to young people, while herself completing a degree in computer sciences.
“I don’t think that being able to code should make you drop out of college, especially in a conservative place like Germany,” she said. “I believe higher education can teach you other important things, like that making money isn’t all that matters.”
For Mr. Casey, the Irish programmer, it does not seem that the money matters all that much — so far, at least.
About 50,000 units of the Alien Ball, which he said were generally priced at $0.99 each, were downloaded, but in terms of his actual earnings, “I really don’t know the exact figures.”
Mr. Casey’s views on education, as well as his passion for technology, were not initially endorsed by his parents, who are both accountants. In fact, Mr. Casey tricked his parents into buying his first laptop, when he was 12. He sent them a letter purporting to come from Apple that highlighted the benefits of a laptop for children’s progress.
Mr. Casey’s parents, however, are now firmly behind their son’s business ventures, acting as company directors because he is too young to be held legally accountable. They also take turns traveling with him to events like the Madrid conference.
“I used to think university was essential to succeed,” his mother, Louise, said. “But since Jordan has gone on this path, I’ve come to recognize that there really are different ways to get to where you want to be.”
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