This Summer Camp Grows Young Entrepreneurs

DAN LYNCH knows that he is one of the fortunate ones. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, he helped start, and later sold, a string of
successful high-technology companies long before the dot-com bubble burst. (Remember CyberCash and Infoseek?)

By AMY CORTESE- NY Times

Now he spends most of his free time in his 1,000-acre vineyard in the Napa Valley, leisurely making wine under the Lynch Valley and Napa Dan labels.
But he is hardly resting.

"When my ship came in, it became obvious to me that I wanted to do my part to help give back to society," Mr. Lynch, 60, said in a recent interview.

Next weekend, he and his wife, Karen, will officially open Camp Venture Creek in the hills of Nevada City, Calif., near Sacramento. It is a nonprofit
operation where children ages 8 to 14 can hike, swim, work on arts and crafts and, through a daily 90-minute program called KidBiz, learn how to
become successful entrepreneurs.

Address of Camp Venture Creek:

12672 Friar Tuck Road,

Grass Valley, California

USA, 95949

Phone of Camp Venture Creek:

(530) 265-4498

Plenty of specialized camps are available, and some focus on business or entrepreneurship. But how many have a mentor list that includes top
executives from Sun Microsystems, Accel Partners, Akamai Technologies, Softbank and Bowman Capital?

Camp Venture Creek costs $1,800 for a two-week session. But tuition can be sharply discounted, based on household income, and scholarships are
available. A child from a family with an annual income of less than $60,000 may pay as little as $100.

One goal of the camp, Mr. Lynch said, is to help children, particularly those from low-income families, turn their passions into profits.

"We teach kids the concept of marketing: Who are you trying to reach? What do they need?" he said. "And if that is something you love to do, you
win."

Mr. Lynch bought the 60-acre camp, a fixer-upper, two years ago. Last summer, he recruited 255 low-income children from California and Washington,
D.C., for a pilot program there. For many of the campers, he said, it meant three square meals a day for the first time.

The business part of the Camp Venture Creek pilot program begins with an introduction to basic business concepts, like supply and demand and
marketing. The children in the pilot program were asked to make two lists — of things they are passionate about and things they do well. Then they
were told to come up with a business idea based on the two that would serve the camp market. By the third day, the children were drawing up simple
business plans with help from camp counselors.

The ventures they created were as diverse as the children themselves and spawned a thriving camp economy, complete with its own currency.

Four 12-year-old girls developed a post-card business, figuring that other campers would want to write home. (Two of the more artistically inclined girls
designed them, while the other two focused on the business side.) A group of three boys started an advertising firm to help the other children promote
their ventures.

But if there were a Most Likely to Succeed in Silicon Valley Award, it might have gone to an 11-year-old boy from Oakland, Calif. He appointed himself
the landlord for the camp and began charging "rent" to the other campers. With the "money" he took in, he set up a bank, granting loans to those who
needed capital to expand their ventures. He did not stop there: when some of the ventures went bankrupt, he bought them and set about turning them
into money-making ventures.

Participants this year can expect the help of mentors from the worlds of technology and venture capital — many of them friends of Mr. Lynch. The
mentors include Bud Colligan, a software entrepreneur who is now a partner at Accel Partners, the venture capital firm, and Meihong Xu, a principal at
Softbank Ventures.

Mr. Lynch and his staff said they were heartened by the business knowledge displayed by their budding protégés last summer. But, they added, the
camp aims to teach much more than business. Equally important, they said, are life lessons in collaboration, relationships, goal-setting, responsibility
and the integrity of creating something of value.

"We teach them that they can take risks and can be masters of their own destiny," said Dennis Campbell, the program director of the camp.

That is something that Mr. Lynch has learned over the years — along with the value of perseverance. He spent 15 years as a computer center manager
at various California universities and became familiar with Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet. It was not until 1986, however, that he had his first
business success — Interop, a popular computer networking conference he started when the market for such technology was taking off. After selling
the conference to Ziff Davis Media, he became an "angel investor," helping to start several successful companies, including UUNet, an Internet
networking company that was later bought by WorldCom and then by America Online; CyberCash, an online payment system that was bought by
Verisign; and Infoseek, an early Internet search engine company that was acquired by the Walt Disney Company.

ESPITE his past successes, Mr. Lynch is not immune to the continuing steep decline in the value of technology companies. He initially intended to
support the camp on his own, and has already spent $7 million to set the camp into motion. But he needs to raise $10 million more, he says —
perhaps from some of his venture capital friends — to keep it going.

"I really like the idea of doing my own camp; I get to define what’s going to happen," he said. "Part of the joy of being a start-up is that you are master
of your own ship."

"It would have been much easier to write a check," he added. "Instead, I got in and wrestled with it as an operating business."