Students tapped into their entrepreneurial side this past Saturday at the TEDx conference that featured four keynote speakers.

Called TEDx, the event was self-organized by students and independent to the larger TED organization, though it had some broader affiliations: videos of the keynote speakers were uploaded to the TED site, www.ted.com, and our school’s branch was mentioned on its site. The conference was open for all local high school students and college students, and a total of about 120 students participated throughout the day.

The theme of the day was “fostering youth entrepreneurship.” The team of students who organized the event worked to find entrepreneurs who fit the theme and were willing to speak at this “TED-like conference.”

The speakers included Jeff Rothschild, Salim Ali, Jeff Jordan, and Priyanka Jain. Rothschild’s career was kick-started by his success in the company, Veritas Software, which he co-founded and was also the VP of Infrastructural Software at Facebook.

Ali focused his talk on his company, LoYakk, which he co-founded to “enable real-time sharing of experiences,” according to tedx.harker.org. Jordan is another entrepreneur, who has invested in numerous companies and currently sits on the board of many companies, such as Pinterest. Lastly, Jain started a non-profit in high school called iCAREweCARE, which concentrates on social media produced by students.

Curator-in-training Brian Tuan (11) explained the process the team went through to find the keynote speakers. At the beginning of the year, members came up with a list of entrepreneurs who they would ideally like to see at this conference. Next, they tried to find connections to them through parents, faculty, and older speakers. The hardest and biggest decision, however, was choosing who should actually speak.

“In the end, we have to find a balance between just accepting people who accepted our invitations and saying “no” to others and finding people who can best inspire the students,” Brian said.

Freshman Ankur Karwal explained that he attended the conference because he wanted an early start into the business world.

“My favorite [talk] was the LoYacc speech by Salim Ali about connecting people based on communities instead of friends. I had just never really thought about the idea before,” he said.

Besides the keynote speakers, the TEDx team also gathered a group of local entrepreneurs, most of them parents, to sit with students during lunch and talk about what they themselves do and how they got there. Students perused small biographies of each person before picking one to sit with.

The TEDx team hopes to continue this yearly tradition in future years because of the success and interest shown by students this year.