It is a tale which could teach seasoned corporates a thing or two. A bunch of youngsters barely out of their teens have founded and are running hugely successful Internet companies. The Indian avatar of the American Dream is unfolding on a medium that hit the country just a couple of years ago.

Doshi's USP: Network Genie offered the same services as the competition at half the cost and barely after a year of business, it boasted of 100 clients. Doshi may have decided to shut shop, but there are several like him who are staying on.

His school friend and `rival', 20-year-old Bhavin Turakhia, set up Directi immediately after graduating. Turakhia decided to pursue businessinstead of studying further. Directi, which did business worth Rs 7 lakh last year, hosts sites for top-notch organisations such as the Centre for Monitoring of Indian Economy. Turakhia is now eyeing a target of Rs 30 lakh for this year, and plans to expand into web marketing services.

Nirav Sanghvi (25) set up his web design firm Nettalk at 23, after he graduated from the Vijay Mukhi Computer Institute. The company has a staff of three, and a turnover of Rs 15 lakh. Sanghvi is now working on e-commerce sites for brokers and stock exchanges.

Rohit Tikmany (21) founded two internet firms - Blueweb and Velocity Corporation. While Blueweb does hi-tech consulting in the area of voice over Internet Protocol (IP) and fax over IP, Velocity Corp, co-founded with classmate Jesus Lall, is in the business of unified messaging. Velocity Corp has partnered with market leader Jfax.com to bring the concept to India. Tikmany is even listed in the International Who's Who along with millionares like Azim Premji of Wiproand N R Narayana Murthy of Infosys.

And then there's Murphy John and Ritesh Kakkad (21), who turned down two offers to sell their web-applications company Indsoft - one from a Indian firm for Rs 10 lakh and one from a NRI for Rs 25 lakh. ``We will go public in the next two to three years. We don't want to sell the company,'' John told Express Newsline. Indsoft, whose annual turnover runs into lakhs, is working on the official site of Amitabh Bachchan, to be launched on October 11, the Big B's birth date.

``The typical Internet entrepreneur today is 20-25 years old all over the world. India is no expection... The Internet has changed the rules of the game,'' says Mukhi, who incidentally, has taught all three entrepreneurs. ``When I was doing my engineering, no one would have taught of starting a company,'' he adds.

Interestingly, none of the entreprenuers are dependent on parents' largesee. Turakhia did initially borrow Rs 50,000 from his parents, but says he repaid it in the very first month. Thebusiness is now self-funded, he asserts.

The youths win hands down over big companies like Indiaworld and Rediff on The Net when it comes to registering domain names, the term for addresses on the net. Bhavin Chandrana (23), who bought Doshi's company, is a premium partner of Internic, which registers all .com and .org domain names. This means his company, IndiaLinks Web Hosting and Services, registers at least 50 domains a month. In fact, Bhavin and Nikhil Rathi (19) are probably the youngest of the eight premier partners that Internic has in India.

Chandrana started his company when he was only 20, at a time when hardly anyone had heard of the net in India. To date, he has registered an amazing 3,900 domains which run on 12 dedicated servers, accounting for a business of Rs 50 lakh. Looks like the age of the netycoon is here.