But the “do it now” idea, evangelized on a digital pulpit, can feel more immediate than academic empiricism. “College is not a prerequisite,” said Jess Teutonico, who runs TEDxTeen, a version of the TED talks and conferences for youth, where Ryan spoke a few weeks ago. “These kids are motivated to take over the world,” she said. “They need it fast. They need it now.”

The college-or-not debate neglects other questions that high school students like Ryan and Louis and their families are wrestling with now: Go to class or on a business trip? Do grades still matter? What do you do with $20,000 when you’re 15? And when the money rolls in, what happens to parental control?

“Things used to be linear. You went to a good school and you got a good job, and that was the societally acceptable thing to do,” said Ms. Stern, Ryan’s mother, who was a straight-A student and is a graduate of Duke University.

Now, she said, “there is no rule book.”

Productive Procrastination

Ryan and his business partner, Michael Hansen, who is 17, met in seventh grade. They each had a pet lizard and liked computers. They were nerdy, but not nerds, and they were complementary: Michael is precise and, like his close-cropped hair, not flashy. In the partnership, he’s the programmer. Ryan is high-energy; he talks in veritable tweets, bursts of slick, hypercasual quips laced with start-up vernacular. (South by Southwest is “South By.” Of the author John Green, he says, “Everyone my age loves him, which is really interesting from a teen sociology product development perspective.”)

But Michael and Ryan shared a goal: “Since middle school,” Michael said, “we wanted to make an app.”

App making, while hardly child’s play, has become easier. It’s not necessary to know intensive programming language to make a simple one. Apple, as well as other phone makers and tech companies, provide shortcuts, like templates that let you drop in images or automate payment methods. But making a complex app is still a big deal, requiring programming expertise and design and business savvy. And competition is fierce, with a million apps in the iPhone store alone.

Ryan was studying for his 10th-grade finals in December 2011 when he thought: I wish there was something that would help me stop procrastinating. So, he procrastinated by sketching a picture of a to-do-list app that would let you clump tasks into three time frames: short term, medium term and long. The idea was to help people prioritize and not feel overwhelmed.