KEY POINTS:
Stephen Weir arrived in New Zealand yesterday for the first holiday he has had in two years.
But it's not all rest and relaxation over the next two weeks - he is hoping to launch a website called www.invent help.co.nz that will help New Zealand inventors commercialise their ideas.
Having started six companies and embarked on many more business ventures over the past 10 years, 27-year-old Weir figures he has a pool of valuable advice.
After all he is now one of the youngest entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and running an American business he thinks might be "the one".
Growing up in Glenfield, says Weir, he was that kid who was good at Monopoly and who "definitely wanted to be making money somehow".
At 17 he was organising school after-ball functions for a profit. Later he sold car parts online and by the time he was 20 he had visited Japan to source products for an online importing business which he financed by buying and selling a Japanese car.
The importing idea came out of a documentary he had seen about a 17-year-old with a similar venture in the United Kingdom.
"I thought if he could do it so could I," Weir says.
While in Japan Weir tracked down a New Zealand entrepreneur called Johnny Hendriksen he had read an article about and decided he had to meet.
The pair hit it off so well Hendriksen asked Weir to set up a New Zealand branch of his online DVD rental business. They have been business partners ever since.
That's the first piece of advice Weir has for budding entrepreneurs: get a mentor.
The next is to talk to people - Weir has carried a notepad around with him for the past 10 years and is always writing down ideas.
And then to get the idea off the ground: be realistic and do not miss an opportunity. "You've just got to walk more than you talk, it's all about execution. There's a ton of ideas, it's all about picking one and doing it well."
Weir holds a graduate diploma in commerce but thinks he's learned 1000 times more through his companies and through losing a lot of money from his companies.
One of those lessons is that sometimes it all just comes down to who you are standing next to.
He was standing next to his first business success story in a slow coffee queue at Auckland University in 2001.
The man, an inventor named Mike Kessell, headed the university's exchange programme, and Weir pocketed his business card as he was interested in studying in the States.
They got talking about Weir's Japanese importing venture Kessell saw an entrepreneurial streak and showed Weir the squeezable yoghurt pot he had created.
"He put a cup in front of me and a piece of paper that said '50/50' and asked whether I was in. I said 'yup'."
That business Tarvis Technology is now doing "very well" and is the design behind some of Fonterra's yoghurt products.
Weir also jumped on board Kessell's bottle-top invention under Axial Technologies, which is run parallel to Tarvis.
Details are confidential but the business is also doing well.
Soon afterwards Weir was accepted to the University of California, Berkeley. Having already obtained a degree from the University of Auckland it was as much about networking as it was studying.
And he was also doing diligence on one of he and Hendriksen's business ideas as well as doing market research for Tarvis Technology.
The sheer scale of business, the size of the markets and the opportunity to mix with ambitious, entrepreneurial people sealed Weir's decision that America was the place he needed to be to do business.
He had also decided he wanted to move into the the fast-paced business of online technology, rather than manufacturing where it can take up to three years to secure a patent.
While waiting for his green card he and Hendriksen launched web-based invitations company Saturn Media and a spin-off Japanese online booking company called Yobu.
When the green card arrived Weir took the Saturn Media shell to Silicon Valley in California. An online event invitation business (similar to Facebook events) launched early last year morphed into a platform for small and medium event organisers to promote and sell tickets to their events. This business, called MadeIt, kicked off on October 1.
But competition is fierce. "You know how hard they are working and that you have to beat them. There's no rest," he says.
PROFILE - STEPHEN WEIR
Age: 27.
Born: Glenfield, North Shore.
Lives: Silicon Valley, San Francisco.
Education: Bayview Primary, Glenfield College, University of Auckland, California University Berkeley (graduate diploma in commerce).
Start-up companies: Tarvis Technology (2001), Axial Technologies (2001), Saturn Media (2004), Yobu (2005), Saturn Media (2007), MadeIt.com (2008).
