The stereotype of teenagers being hopeless, grumpy losers couldn’t be more out of date. We meet the new breed of entrepreneur

In Pennsylvania, US, Neha Gupta, then nine years old, earned her first $800 for charity by selling her toys at a garage sale. Now 19, and the founder and CEO of the not-for-profit organisation Empower Orphans, she has raised more than $1.5 million to help 25,000 children in India. In London, Nick D’Aloisio made headlines two years ago when he sold his news app Summly to Yahoo for $30 million. He was 17 at the time. Tavi Gevinson started a fashion blog when she was 12. At 19, she is a magazine editor, actress, model and consultant, with plenty of other roles besides. The New York Times recently labelled her a ‘multihyphenate’. In restaurants throughout the United States, Flynn McGarry, a chef, hosts pop-up events for diners paying up to $180 each to try his langoustine tartare or Champagne- fermented turnips. McGarry began cooking for paying guests out of his mother’s Studio City, California kitchen when he was 12; he’s 16 now.

As tween and teenage members of generation Z – young people born between 1994 and 2010 – continue to develop apps, launch million-follower vlogs, create fashion collections and form not-for- profit groups, we’re likely to see more of these multihyphenates make the news. Together, they increasingly give form to the notion that today’s teenagers are an ambitious, industrious, audacious bunch; an enterprising generation set to change the face of education, politics, society and the economy as we know it.