Silicon Valley: The rise of the adolescent CEOs

A look at the ever-younger entrepreneurs that Silicon Valley investors are backing these days. While little data on the phenomenon exists, venture capitalists say they are funding more chief executives under age 21 than ever before.

Marc Andreessen and other venture capitalists say the entrepreneurs they fund at 18 or 19 typically have been prepping for years -- learning computer code, taking on ambitious freelance projects and educating themselves on the Internet. Some are self-consciously molding themselves in the image of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 27, who created computer games as a child and was taking a graduate-level computer course by his early teens.