My name is Colin Winter and this is my entrepreneurial story.

For a couple years before high school, I ran a video game website called RageForGames (RFG). Inspired by videos on halo.bungie.org, I developed a passion for making music video tributes for my favorite video games.

Two years, two dozen videos, and over a million views later, I decided to take a break from RFG before starting high school so I wouldn’t seem like a total geek. I even took up playing football!

It didn’t matter. The geek in me was already hooked…

After football season ended freshmen year, I threw away any hope of a social life and started a new website “to organize the best videos on the Internet”. So in early 2005 (pre-YouTube) I curated over 500 amazing videos and promoted the website with two music videos featuring the craziest clips.

Just a few months later, I had to shutdown the site because it was costing too much. I maxed out an expensive dedicated server with over 100K unique visitors.

Now a sophomore in high school, I was pretty well known for my tech skills. I had been the sole IT support for my small K-8 school (pro-bono of course), so I guess it was only natural to turn my skills into a business.

I won a local business award the next year and that’s when I realized I am, and always will be, an entrepreneur. The two previous web-ventures had come so naturally to me. It was time to focus, get serious, and CRUSH IT!

I started getting smarter, teaching myself more of everything. I knew I couldn’t service my computer repair clients when I left for college (remote support wasn’t so easy back then). So I decided to switch my efforts to website design and marketing, by starting Websites Unleashed, LLC. This led me to my next big idea: LinkLarry

In short, LinkLarry provided a widget for blogs and websites crowdsource ‘related links’ from their visitors. My vision was to multiply the amount of linking around content online so people would be more connected than ever when browsing the web.

I learned all about the blogging industry and the impact of social media as it reached its tipping point. Unfortunately, I failed to gain traction with the startup and learned many lessons in entrepreneurship the hard way.

So I decided to enroll in Babson College, the #1 school for entrepreneurship, to obtain a formal education for what I’ve been trying to do on my own.

After researching a few ideas, an unexpected opportunity arose my freshmen year. My college roommate and I found a video chat website that was taking off over winter break. We felt we could make it better and so we started ShuffleChat.

So much happened in such a short period of time; I never worked so hard and slept so little in my life. ShuffleChat was accepted into Babson’s Summer Venture Program where I tried to pivot the startup without much success and subsequently shut it down. The opportunity was no longer what it started as, and while there was still some potential, I wasn’t passionate about any of the new directions.

Sophomore year I bounced around with a few projects, most notably a TV commercial for GoDaddy and a short film (to be released summer 2012).

Pursuing a seemingly endless torrent of business ideas led me to make the best decision of my life. I decided to throw away every ‘business’ idea I had (well over 100 at this point) and commit to my real dream: changing the way people see and experience music through music videos.

It all started the summer/fall of 2011 with WikiClips.tv, so check it out… Something more refined is in the works now… 2012 is going to be one crazy year!