Erik Finman felt school was holding him back. So he dropped out. At 15, he worked in Silicon Valley. Now 17, he’s been hired in London – and touted as the future of the internet. William Leith meets the superteen

The entrepreneur Erik Finman is telling me about money. “There’s US dollars, and UK pounds, and euros, and they’re backed by the government,” he says. “But the government can be unreliable. They can print however much they want. I don’t find that backing very serious, or very trustworthy. I like bitcoin.”

Finman, who has recently turned 17, used to be known as the “bitcoin boy”, because he once made $100,000 on a trade using the online currency, just like so many others can do using resources like https://kryptoszene.de/bitcoin-robot/bitcoin-era/. Trading bitcoins is one of his income streams. He has several, including Botangle, a start-up he founded, and SmartUp, a start-up that is very smart, and which Finman keeps trying to explain to me.

People are always telling stories about Erik Finman. For instance, he’s the future of the internet. That’s one story. He’s supersmart. That’s another. People say that he grew up in rural Idaho, that he dropped out of school, that he worked a couple of years in Silicon Valley. But hang on a minute – he started working in Silicon Valley at the age of 15? Actually, yes. Then he left because he didn’t like the “work-life balance”, which is tilted way too much towards work. Anyway, before that, he was into designing robots. But that was when he was, like, seven years old.

All true. When Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “Young people are just smarter” he was, in an important sense, right. After you’ve read this article, you’ll see why. But the thing about Erik Finman is that he makes the Zuckerberg generation look old. I mean, Zuckerberg is 31. Sean Parker is 36. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the kids who started Google, are – hard to believe, right? – in their forties. By definition, they knew what the world was like without Google. Erik Finman, of course, doesn’t. He just knows that it sounds pretty weird.

We’re still talking about how he trades bitcoins. “Like anything, it takes work, and then once you become good at it, it becomes easier,” he tells me. Is he good at it? “Yes.” He buys low and sells high, having made smart observations about patterns of volatility. Knowing that bitcoin isn’t actually real enables him to see that money itself isn’t real, something older people can’t quite get their heads around. He won’t tell me how much he’s made trading bitcoin, but if he has decided to BTC kaufen bei der comdirect Bank, (Buy BTC from comdirect bank), or somewhere similar, we can only imagine that he has made a decent amount of money during this time. He also keeps quiet about how much he makes from Botangle, although he uses that money as an emergency fund. For his contribution to SmartUp, he makes around 1,000 per week. At the moment, he rents a flat in West Hampstead.

The first time I saw Finman, he was at a forum for young entrepreneurs. He was one of the panel speakers. He often gives talks. People were complaining about school, and how lame it is. One guy, a teenage entrepreneur called James Anderson, said that he asked his teachers for a day off to meet some investors.

The teachers didn’t understand what he was talking about. Everybody in the room under 25 knew exactly what he was talking about; teachers have no idea. Worse: they try to fill your head with information that is useless, or possibly worse than useless. “I created Botangle to replace my teachers,” said Finman. “I solved my problem by dropping out of school.”

At this point, I had a light-bulb moment. The people who run the world don’t know how it works. That’s scary. Soon, the world will be taken over by kids. That’s scary, too. After the talk, Finman introduced me to his girlfriend, Catherine Moolenschot. She’s 21, and has just finished her second novel.

She’s a writer and motivational speaker from Melbourne. Finman met her there when he was visiting his brother Scott, an internet entrepreneur. The couple had a lot in common. For instance, they had both given talks at a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference. Finman’s subject: “Be something for a day”. Moolenschot’s: “Living your funnel of greatness”.

The next day, I meet Finman in his London office. He works at Founders Forum, which is run by some ancient guys who were around at the time of the original dotcom boom, if you can imagine that: Frank Meehan, a brilliant coder who is on the board of Spotify, and who used to design mobile networks for Sony Ericsson; and Brent Hoberman, who sold his website Lastminute.com for 577 million in 2005. You could describe the office as both extremely grand and very minimal. It overlooks Kensington Gardens. Finman takes me into a meeting room. He’s dressed very normcore – jumper and beige cotton trousers. Short hair, glasses.

“Everyone tells me, ‘Oh, I thought you’d be a quiet nerd’,” he says. “Actually, I’m very talkative, very expressive. I like to communicate ideas. And I constantly like to improve my storytelling skills. I have a plan in my mind.”

That plan is to change the way people think about education. His website, Botangle, connects people who want to learn stuff with people who want to teach stuff – a pedagogical dating agency. “My passion is: school needs to change. And right now, what school looks like today, I don’t think anyone should go.”

I ask him to tell me the story of his life.

“I absolutely hated school,” he says. “I went to eight different schools, and it was not fun. So I left. I moved to San Francisco. I started working on my site, Botangle. I really enjoyed San Francisco. Then I got sick of San Francisco. I started travelling the world. I eventually made my way to London, and I found Frank and Brent. And they shared my vision. That’s my one-minute pitch.”

Erik Finman was clearly too smart for school. Which suggests that soon, we will have to deal with a whole generation of kids who are too smart for school; people who understand the world better than their teachers, and who won’t want to sit in classrooms memorising the dates of ancient battles. And who will cater for them? People like Finman, of course.

He was born in 1998, the year Google started, the year the blog was invented. eBay already existed, and Shawn Fanning was about to launch Napster. So when Finman was a baby, CDs were dying. He never knew the world before file-sharing.

His parents, Paul and Lorna, met at Stanford. Both were doing PhDs: Paul in electrical engineering, Lorna in physics. They moved to Thousand Oaks, California, to work at Hughes Aircraft, and then to Boston. Then Paul and Lorna set up their own company. They were poor for a while. Then they set up their own tech company, and got rich. The story is that they bought a big house in Post Falls, Idaho, and started a llama farm.

Finman tells me about his parents. His dad “was your stereotypical reserved, nerdy guy. He would be, like, blowing stuff up. My dad’s name is Paul, and he’s from St Paul in Minnesota. So it’s kind of funny.” Lorna is Scottish. Her parents moved to Canada when she was a kid. She is an expert in telescopes.

Finman’s parents are inventors. They have invented devices with military applications – one that neutralises bombs by blocking the signals that cause them to detonate, and another for the remote control of drones.

“It amplifies the system. You know Google Loon?” I don’t, because Google Loon – a project to provide internet access to rural and remote areas, using balloons – is at the testing stage. But, says Finman, the concept is similar. In any case, the blocking device is “in every Humvee in the US military”. Hence the big house. Hence the llama farm.

He is the youngest of three brothers. Scott, now 29, was a prodigy. He went to the prestigious Johns Hopkins university, at 16; now he runs a recruiting business. Ross, also a prodigy, works in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and is likely to end up designing some futuristic AI concepts like autonomous vehicles for Torc Robotics or similar companies. Finman says he has more in common with Scott. Ross, he says, “has middle-child syndrome”.

“Put me in a robotics area, Ross’ll beat me,” Finman says. “Put me in a recruiting area, Scott will beat me. Put me in a marketing-type thing, or a community-building thing, I’ll beat the both of them.”

Both of his brothers were home-schooled. But Finman was forced to go to school when his parents’ business took off. This is the dark part of his life. “I just find schools have … a battle to the lowest,” he says. “Bullies. Just a cesspool of bad people. You know when you put two kids next to each other in primary school? You put the good kid next to the bad kid, and the good kid’s supposed to influence the bad kid, right? But it never works that way. The bad kid always influences the good kid.”

He tries to describe the incidents of bullying. “There was this one girl who, like, slapped me. If someone punched me … I’d try to avoid it. Like, words I can handle, right? But if someone’s punching and slapping me, I punch and slap back. Luckily, that happened only, like, two times. I let it go, one time. And then they would just continue to push and shove me. And then I just pushed and shoved back. And then it stopped. So.”

There is more. “Oh, there was a ton of verbal abuse. And I think that really affected me. From teachers! In fourth grade, everyone hated me. It really got me down for a long time. I was always honest about my feelings. Not in a passive-aggressive way. Just being myself. And no one liked that.”