But how will the company make money? That objective was skirted in the first dotcom boom, and startups today are again beginning to take it rather casually. Kim says he's more intent on attracting users right now than in figuring out how to generate revenue. (Sound familiar?) He'll run advertising, naturally, and he expects sponsorships. Maybe he'll eventually charge for game downloads. But the endgame is most likely a sale of his company rather than an initial public offering, and that marks another difference between the last tech boom and this one. Going public isn't a realistic goal for many of these startups, especially for ventures that, like Kim's, fall into the "leantech" category—those with low overhead and small staffs. Instead, he would be just as happy selling out to a large corporation.

It all sounds almost too easy: Design some software, give it away, and then start counting the money. But if WeGame's potential isn't yet clear, it's at least promising enough for investors to take a flier on the company. In August, Kim met with a potential backer, 33-year-old Naval Ravikant. Ravikant had started a few companies himself, including the classified-ad search site Vast.com and, before that, Epinions.com, which eventually merged with another company, went public, and was bought by eBay in 2005 for $620 million. Ravikant and Kim had talked earlier in the summer, and Ravikant had offered him funding, but Kim wasn't ready. A few weeks later, Kim emailed Ravikant late one night, and the pair agreed to meet the next morning at 11.

They sat at Caffe Centro, a coffee shop where deals get made in South Park, the leafy heart of San Francisco's Web industry. Within walking distance are the offices of Wired magazine, the social-networking site Twitter, the blog search engine Technorati, and the Web-based video-publishing service VideoEgg, along with Yahoo's Brickhouse research lab and a host of startups that few have yet heard of. Ravikant and Kim talked for just a few minutes before Ravikant offered him $250,000. Kim was surprised and elated. "He emailed me the term sheet right there from his laptop," Kim says.

For his part, Ravikant left the meeting impressed by Kim. "He knows what people want on the internet. They want things simple and social. People want to show off what they're doing to their friends and do it without hassle. His design is very simple, and he's doing it very cheaply."

Kim drew a similar investment from True Ventures, a small firm that specializes in early-stage companies and has no problem making investments of a few hundred thousand dollars. The firm has already bankrolled startups like Automattic, founded by Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress blogging software.

It's a sign of the current climate in Silicon Valley that Kim—a teenager with several unsuccessful Web ventures behind him—came away with more than $500,000, about twice what he thought he would need. Better yet, he managed to negotiate favorable terms, retaining more than 60 percent of the company's equity, he says. As soon as Kim secured the funding, he sent an instant message to Dennis Fong, one of his unpaid advisers. A videogame champion who once won a Ferrari in a Quake tournament, Fong also co-founded a gaming site called Xfire.com and later sold it to Viacom for $102 million. "Jared said, 'I just raised a round,' " Fong recalls. "I said, 'Congrats. Now the work begins.' "

By late October, Kim had put some of the money to work by hiring a software coder as his first full-time employee, and he was planning to launch the beta version of his site. "In three months, I could be out of business or I could be the next hot startup in Silicon Valley," he says. And if it doesn't fly? "I'm 19. I have a lot of years in front of me."