Australia’s startup wunderkind Lachy Groom on the next big thing, tips for success, and building credibility

17-year-old Lachy Groom knows a thing or two about running full-fledged, online businesses. At 11-years-old, he started learning to code in HTML and CSS, and by the age of 13, he founded PSDtoWP, a company that turned PhotoShop files into WordPress pages. The company was sold nine months later.

Next, he started PAGGStack.com, a website that sells nutritional supplements to customers around the world. Again, he sold the company in months. By the age of 15, Lachy was already onto his third online business, iPadCaseFinder. Launched in 2010, the site lets users search for iPad cases and find out where to buy them. The website was successfully acquired.

He then moved on to his next two ideas, which he still owns today. The first is Cardnap, which is a site for visitors to buy and resell discount gift cards. The second one is TheWP.co,  which builds WordPress sites from scratch and also offers Photoshop file to WordPress conversion.

Lachy now has his eyes set on Silicon Valley. He has visited regularly to absorb the culture and interacting with entrepreneurs. He has also kept a keen eye on Dev Bootcamp, a startup that turns total noobs into novice web developers in 10 weeks. Passionate about education, he hopes to one day start a company in the industry.

But one thing stands in his way.

With such an impressive résumé, you’d think Lachy would have no problems getting a work visa to stay in San Francisco. But his age and lack of a university degree mean that he is excluded from the primary visa for immigrants with specialized skills.

His best bet now lies with the O-1 visa, which grants entry to individuals that “demonstrate extraordinary ability by sustained national or international acclaim and must be coming temporarily to the United States to continue work in the area of extraordinary ability.”

While a lawyer is busy putting together the application for him, we found a chance to chat with him over Skype on his thoughts on entrepreneurship and where today’s opportunities lie.

SGE: You’ve said before that starting a business is more about anticipating the wave rather than riding the tail end of it. How do you train or develop the sense for it and do you think it’s something that’s inherent in certain people?

Lachy: An element of it is inherent. It’s something that some people have and others don’t. It can definitely be developed to an extent. I mean, it really takes some awareness of the surroundings and constantly consuming news and being aware of what’s happening in the scene. Some people are better at it than others; at discerning the facts from the bullshit.

How did you discover that you have this ability or talent?

It mostly came through previous successes. A lot of people go: ‘Yeah, I had that idea six months ago.’ When something blows up, I noticed it very quickly and I knew it was going to be big. That came with a few of my business ideas. It’s mostly noticing at the time that a trend is about to take off and thinking this is big and you should get in on it. With the iPadCaseFinder, a lot of people thought the iPad would be a flop but I thought it was fairly obvious that it would become huge.

What would you think are some of the trends today that are about to go big? If you were to start a business now, what would you do?

Education is one. We’re seeing the rise of startups like Coursera, Udacity, edX, and other startups like General Assembly, DevBootcamp, and Codecademy; I think we’re just in the beginning of the growth. A lot is happening right now, I think it will go up exponentially.