A New Medium For Their Text Messages

Dexter M. Briscoe likes being in charge, watching market fluctuations and playing the price adjustment game so that his products sell for just less than those of his competitors.

The Suitland High School sophomore is blunt about the reason he started an online clothing retailer. "I wanted to make money," Briscoe says, with the casualness of a veteran entrepreneur.

His company, Gore-Dex Sportswear , was one of the 38 businesses founded by at-risk high school students and on display last week at the annual dinner of the Washington chapter of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship . The organization has been around since 1987, but in recent years has largely been adopted as a pet project of the local technology community.

"I think that the tech entrepreneur starts a business in the absolute rawest form. They have an idea, but they don't have revenue or customers," said S. Tien Wong , chief executive of Opus 8 Inc. , a Chevy Chase private investment firm, and chairman of the event. "When you see high school kids starting their businesses -- whether it's cookies or jewelry -- that's entrepreneurship in its rawest form, too. I think they can relate to it."

Among the techies wandering throughout the student booths during cocktail hour were Roger Mody , founder of Signal Corp.; John Kealey , chief executive of iDirect Technologies Inc.; John W. Holaday , founder of EntreMed Inc. and chairman of the Harvest Bank of Maryland; and Raymond Rice , co-founder of KenRay Partners , an executive search firm that caters to the technology industry.

The foundation runs courses to teach disadvantaged students the fundamentals of starting and running a small business. Students write business plans, create companies and eventually compete for regional and national awards.

The tech crowd came out in force May 3 to admire the handmade bracelets and greeting cards being sold by the students, and to support Raul J. Fernandez , founder of Proxicom Inc. and chief executive of ObjectVideo , who was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the foundation. The 680 people who showed up at the Wardman Park Marriott hotel raised $435,000 for the NFTE.

Overheard: "I could tell you about the litany of advice I got back in the '60s when I first went into networking -- that it was a dead end. That there was no 'there' there," said Robert Kahn at a Tuesday night gathering of the Washington chapter of the Internet Society . Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf , who are often called the "fathers of the Internet," reflected on the Web's past and future during the society's meeting at the McLean headquarters of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc . The two were recently named winners of the Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award , often considered the Nobel prize of the computing world.

Ellen McCarthy writes about the local tech scene every Thursday. Her e-mail address ismccarthye@washpost.com.