How a 16-Year-Old Built a Global Tech Lifeline to Protect the Intellectual Property of Minors

When teenagers launch nonprofits, research journals, or mental health hotlines, they possess the drive to change the world. But they rarely possess the tools. Operating on temporary school emails, free subdomains, and borrowed cloud drives, their hard work often vanishes the moment they graduate or a platform updates its terms of service.

Neksha DeSilva experienced this loss firsthand. After losing his childhood digital creations to expired accounts and closed platforms, he realized a quiet crisis was unfolding: the intellectual property of minors was disappearing.

Starting with $0 in a single room in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Neksha founded OpenRockets, a zero-profit infrastructure service provider for nonprofits run by people under 19. Today, OpenRockets is a global operation run by nearly 60 teenage volunteers across 14 countries. They provide free domains, DDoS protection, safe browsers, and permanent citation identifiers to youth organizations worldwide.

Tanusha Narula from The Optimist News sat down with Neksha to understand how he built a tech empire for teens, by teens.

Tanusha Narula: OpenRockets started in Colombo with $0, faced early hurdles, and was rebuilt into a global platform. What was the turning point that gave you the resilience to keep going?

Neksha DeSilva: The turning point was not a single moment of resilience, but a change in the question I was asking. Our first versions—a platform to connect students, and a crowdfunding model—failed. I shut the organization down and listed the domain for $15 just to buy a Raspberry Pi board. Nobody bought it.

For a year and a half, I had been asking how to get students to use something we had built. I finally stopped asking that and started asking whether the people already doing serious work were missing something. I called teen founders on Discord and Slack—15-year-olds running peer-reviewed journals, 16-year-olds taking mental health calls.

What they needed was completely unglamorous: an email address that doesn’t expire. Storage. Protection from being knocked offline. A citation identifier. That is the moment OpenRockets stopped being an organization looking for members, and became the infrastructure that other people’s organizations run on.

Tanusha: You emphasize protecting the “intellectual property of minors.” Why is this such a critical, often-overlooked issue?

Neksha: It is overlooked because nobody experiences it as a loss at the moment it happens. A 14-year-old finishes something real, it goes into a folder somewhere, and eight years later the folder is gone.

A child’s brain is running a different process than an adult’s. Synaptic density in early childhood is far higher. The impressive result isn’t an AI model that produces a drawing of a car after training on billions of parameters; it is the 4-year-old who draws a car from a few thousand observations, while still being curious and hungry.

But a minor cannot legally sign platform agreements. Their work sits under a parent’s account or nowhere at all. OpenRockets Press is our answer. Every accepted artifact—from research papers to 3D models and code—receives a permanent Archival Resource Key. It means a 15-year-old’s project can be cited correctly by anybody, and can still be found when that child is 30.

Tanusha: You now have nearly 60 volunteers across 14 countries, most of whom you have never met. How do you manage and inspire a global team of teenagers?

Neksha: What works is freedom and clarity. My early mistake was treating volunteers as though they had come for a return. They had not, because there was no return to offer.

When somebody owns a system here, they own it. I do not review their decisions and I do not manage their hours. A 16-year-old in Madrid runs our conference arm. A member in Australia built our age verification model. I stopped asking for attention and started handing over responsibility.

Tanusha: You are drafting custom semi-open-source licenses (like the Beaver and Kangaroo licenses) specifically for minors. What gap are these filling?

Neksha: Imagine a 15-year-old publishing a project and opening the license selector. MIT, Apache, Creative Commons—every option was written by adults for adults, assuming an author who can enter into a binding contract. In most countries, a minor cannot.

Our licenses (Kangaroo, Beaver, and Hummingbird) are semi-open source because full permissiveness is not protection when the author is 12. Beaver shares material for non-commercial use, but requires an adult who wants to use it to file a formal request, which we review on the author’s behalf. A child should never have to negotiate alone with an adult company about their own work.

Tanusha: The Interkid Project focuses heavily on a safer internet. Why was this specific issue so important for your team to tackle?

Neksha: Go back to your own first device. You likely felt the accumulated warning of every adult around you: “Be careful with it.” For an enormous number of children, the first impression of the internet was a caution rather than an astonishment.

If the first thing any of us had ever heard about walking was a warning, I do not think we would walk the way we do. We let kids fall and learn, but the internet’s current safe mode is just a locked room.

Interkid is a search engine and browser built with a zero-tolerance policy toward harmful material. It uses recursive preloading—the page is fetched and evaluated fully before the child sees it. If something is found, it is blocked silently. They shouldn’t have to carry the knowledge that they passed close to something harmful.

Tanusha: What is your ultimate dream for OpenRockets in the next few years?

Neksha: Our first goal is to be the infrastructure provider for nonprofits inside one in every five high schools in the United States, and then globally. We provide credibility. When a nonprofit run by a 15-year-old operates from a free subdomain, adults discount it. We take that discount away by standing behind them.

Everything provided to nonprofits run by people under 20 is free and will stay free. There is no better time to do better things.

To learn more about OpenRockets or to apply for their services, visit OpenRockets.com.