Young entrepreneurs strike it rich online
Last Updated: Friday, November 10, 2000 | 11:52 PM ET
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Torontonians Albert Lai, 20 and Michael Furdyk, 16, and Australian Michael Hayman, 18, founded and managed mydesktop.com, a network of seven websites that provide information about computers and the Web.
On Tuesday, they sold the business to U.S. company, Internet.com for about $1 million U.S., according to The Globe and Mail.
Mydesktop.com started as a hobby in 1996, when Hayman created a web site to provide information about Microsoft's Windows operating system.
A year later, Hayman, who lives in Brisbane, Australia, formed an on-line partnership with Furdyk, who had his own site on Windows.
Lai, who started up three high-tech companies while still in his teens, joined them and centralized their web sites and newsletters in an office in downtown Toronto.
In just three years, mydesktop.com has grown into a network of seven web sites attracting six million page views a month and distributing eight weekly newsletters to 150,000 registered users.
The firm now has six full-time employees and 20 freelance writers.
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