Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 7)

SM: Do you have a sense of where you want to go from here in terms of your career and businesses? SW: I’m in a period where I am trying to figure that out. I am in this place, business-wise and knowledge-wise, where I am on the cusp of doing something on the next level.

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Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 6)

SM: Much of the comparison shopping industry on the Internet is reviewing products, whereas you are reviewing the retailers. That is the big differentiation? SW: It is. ResellerRatings has always been in this weird niche. Most merchant reviews are only found on shopping engines like Shopping.com. It positions us uniquely because we do not allow opt

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Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 5)

SM: The site was shut down while you were negotiating the purchase? SW: It was only down for a couple of weeks, thankfully, so it was not damaged too much. There were a few articles written saying that ResellerRatings.com was gone. It was unique; I don’t know too many websites that just plain shut down.

Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 4)

SM: How old are you now? SW: Twenty-nine. SM: What happened between 20 and 29? SW: The high point was the sale to EarthWeb, and it went downhill from there.

Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 3)

SM: How did the sellout craze affect you? Were people coming to you trying to buy your site? SW: I had been in Portland for a couple of months when out of the blue I got an email from Andover, which is the company that bought SlashDot and was later acquired by VA Linux. They

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Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 2)

SM: Did you do SysOpt.com full time or was it just on the side? SW: I was doing it on the side. When I was in high school I worked on it after school as a hobby. When it started to pass the $30K, $40K, and $60K a year mark, I started to think there

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Journey of a Child Entrepreneur: Scott Wainner (Part 1)

I have interviewed many entrepreneurs, yet few interviews have been as interesting (or entertaining) as Scott Wainner’s. His first company, SysOpt.com, emerged from his childhood hobby of PC performance optimization (founded when Scott was 15). By the time he started college he had a thriving business and a six-figure income.