Before he was even ten years old, Tyler was already willing to do all kinds of things to earn a quick buck, and he achieved it because he worked hard. He would mow the lawns, babysit for neighbours, set up lemonade stalls – he even performed as a magician at birthday parties for a standard rate of $25 per half hour (not cheap for a kid whose age was still in single figures!).

So when he got a computer at 10, it was destined to be a moneymaker for him. And yet, pretty much the first thing he did was completely tear it apart and rebuild it. By doing this, he was able to learn how computers work.

By the time he started high school, he was repairing computers for the school and charging $15 an hour to fix people’s electronic devices in his spare time – a bit of a pay-cut from his glory days as a magician, but hey.

This high school student computer hardware-whizz wound up babysitting for Merrill Lynch’s Vice President, Malcolm Taaffe, who offered Tyler an internship involving “computer acquisition, setup, training, and troubleshooting”.

A mere two weeks later, Tyler’s “internship” was a proper full-time job.

The now-15-year-old launched a computer repair company called Cooltronics, purely as a hobby side-project. This company gradually expanded in its own right and Tyler found himself in Businessweek’s “Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25” list.