I never really felt like my age stopped people from wanting to work with me. I was speaking at conferences and lecturing at universities at 18, and I think that was mainly because web developing and management was a really young industry.

I was really just a hard-core geek, if you will, in 1996, and was building websites as a hobby. I started doing a lot of web design and development and built my first website on the now-defunct GeoCities platform.

The main thing that 99designs is about is choice. It's a fantastic model that eliminates risk for small business owners and puts designers on equal footing.

If I go to a conference and someone tells me that they learned how to develop websites on Sitepoint and now they're a CTO at a company earning almost $200,000 a year, that lets me know that I'm doing the right thing.