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This Young Aussie Is Now On Time's Most Influential Teens List

Just your average high school drop out-turned-CEO.
Just 17, and most influential.
Instagram: Ben Pasternak
Just 17, and most influential.

Ben Pasternak is just your average high school drop out-turned-CEO.

Okay, so he's not so average and Time have realised this, naming the 17-year-old in their list of The 30 Most Influential Teens of 2016.

Pasternak is the founder and CEO of Flogg, which is pretty much a fusion of Ebay and Tinder, allowing users to buy and sell their unwanted possessions.

At the tender age of 15, he built an iPhone game which shot to the top of Apple charts and landed him invitations to Google and Facebook along with a scholarship to a global Apple developers' conference.

What followed was millions in seed-stage funding from Binary Capital and Greylock for his next big venture, Flogg.

Pasternak's Flogg.
Flogg
Pasternak's Flogg.

In 2015, after Pasternak met film maker Chris Smith who had contacts in the tech industry, the teen dropped out of school and made the move to the Big Apple.

"We talked for a bit and basically he said, 'Come up with a project you really want to work on, drop out of high school, move to New York where I live, I'll connect you with VCs," Pasternak told Fairfax earlier this year.

"I was like, 'Yeah, OK dude ...'"

Now, the teen is adapting to life in New York with a camera crew beside him, for an upcoming documentary, CEO@16.

He still misses Aussie beaches, but the 'Yeah, OK dude' attitude has clearly paid off.

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