Name: Jared Kim

Website: WeGame.com, an online community that provides the tools for gamers to share screencasts of their favorite in-game moments

Location: San Francisco

Gamers, you know the feeling. You’re in the middle of an attack and, suddenly, you click into intense concentration. But this time, unlike the dozens, maybe hundreds, of other times you’ve tried unsuccessfully, it finally happens: In a perfect culmination of timing and strategy, you master the unthinkable — you slay the vile rabbits in World of Warcraft, you defeat the jet-flying terrorists in Call of Duty 4, you pull off a legendary triple kill in Halo 3. Your heart races and you let out a victorious “Yesssss!” Win.

Then you look around and realize there’s no one to share the moment with.

These lonely episodes were what prompted Jared Kim to launch WeGame.com, a site that allows players to capture “screencasts” of their proudest video game segments and showcase them for public viewing. Often called the “YouTube for gamers,” the online community boasts 1.5 million monthly users.

“Growing up playing video games, there were always times when I’d do something and think, ‘Oh my God, that was so cool,’ and then I’d try to explain it to friends and a) they wouldn’t understand because it would be too intricate to describe in words, or b) they just wouldn’t believe me,” recalls Kim, who started the San Francisco-based company last year at age 19. “With WeGame, there’s an educational aspect because you want to show people how things are done, but also, just as a guy, it’s about bragging rights, like, ‘Oh yeah, I did this.’”

For Kim, a Los Angeles native, business was on the brain starting at an early age, when his parents sent him to live in China right after middle school. They predicted the country’s command in the world economy and decided he might as well learn Mandarin.

At age 16, with some seed money from his folks, Kim started his first company called Xinjun Software, an online gaming platform. With 70 employees under his lead, the kid CEO was immersed in the fierce world of entrepreneurship. “It’s a roller coaster,” says Kim, of running a startup. “You’re going to experience the lowest lows and the highest highs. That constant change is really exciting for me. The last thing I wanted was a life where every day was a repeat.”

After 11 months with the company, Kim sold it so he could head off to college. As a freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, he launched his second startup, Yaqqer, a social networking service that connected college students through their cell phones. But he gave up on it just a few months in, citing that “the mobile market just wasn’t ready.”

The idea for WeGame grew out of a personal need. He wanted to show friends his gaming strategies, but when he looked for ways to do this, he found that there were no simple — or cheap — options. Recording programs hogged system resources, slowing the games down. They also wouldn’t output compressed, upload-ready files. And converting and resizing video clips was a major pain.

Kim knew there had to be a better way. He did some market research — mainly asking fellow gamers what they would think about a service that would let them record their in-game action — and found that the response was overwhelmingly positive.

“The more I thought about it, the more crazy I became about it,” he says. “Eventually, it was just, ‘I gotta do this now.’”

He rounded up investors who believed in his mission and raised $3.5 million in financing, a feat that was reported on several major tech blogs. He says his age was never an obstacle; if anything, the fact that he’s part of his own target market has given him an advantage.

WeGame offers a free desktop client that captures screencasts within PC-based games and outputs them to files that can be uploaded quickly to the web. Kim programmed the initial version in his dorm room.

Before finishing his freshman year, Kim dropped out of school to work full-time on the company. His parents were disappointed at first, but the news didn’t completely surprise them and they soon became major supporters.

Today, Kim, now 20, manages 13 employees out of the WeGame headquarters in San Francisco’s SoMa district, a hub for tech industry powerhouses such as Yelp, Twitter and Wired magazine. He generates revenue through advertising and sponsorships, and hopes to eventually sell the company to a large corporation.

“I’ve definitely felt overwhelmed, but that’s the job of a CEO of a startup,” he says. “But if you’ve done your job right, you’re supposed to be the situation where everything is growing really fast.”

What advice would he give to those hoping to start their own internet companies?

“Start,” he says.

In this business, there’s no wiser word.