Not many founders and owners of a company—let alone a rapidly growing one—can say they’ve been in business almost half their lives.

But Matthew Hill, 2009 winner of the Web Services Entrepreneurial Award, is only a few years away from making that statement true. What’s amazing is not only that at age 16 he started the company that would become Liquid Web, but also that it was his third business start-up. That’s right: While his classmates were worried about passing their driver’s test, Hill was working through the steps he would need to take to make his business successful. Twelve years later, 18 months shy of his 30th birthday, Hill has built a Web hosting and data center company into a formidable presence, one with 155 employees, 60 percent growth in sales each year for the past four years, and a worldwide customer base.

Why did Hill choose Web services? “What I liked about [the Internet] was that I understood technology, and it was the only place you could step in and actually operate when you’re 15 or 16 years old and be taken seriously. I had major companies hosting with me at 17 years old. I always presented myself in a professional matter and the website was solid,” says Hill.

In Liquid Web’s formative years, Hill developed a sense of what it would take to be profitable. Not surprisingly, he realized that “college for me would have been a mistake. It would have been a huge distraction and impeded my progress.  A lot of very successful entrepreneurs… go with the goal and skip the education path.”

Hill’s management style? “I don’t micro-manage. I step into divisions, tee them off and then just check in with them periodically. With the high degree of transparency that Liquid Web has, I keep an eye on everything that is happening. What I do day to day is very high level. It’s steering and new progress. If a new product needs to be developed, then I’m completely in it.”

Where does their business come from? “A bulk of our revenue comes from what we call dedicated managed servers. A managed server is actually the device which sits on the Internet and feeds websites out to end users,” explains Hill. “The tangible product we sell more than anything is servers themselves. And we manage them, we maintain them, we respond to any incidents. If something goes wrong at 5 a.m. on a Sunday, our teams respond within five minutes. We keep the Internet up, at least our corner of it.”

With two data centers in Lansing, and a third (which will house 25,000 new servers) that will be opening in the near future to service their ever-expanding business, Hill says that Liquid Web’s customer base is approximately 85 percent domestic and 15 percent international, principally in English-speaking countries. And to what does he attribute his company’s success? “As ubiquitous as anything is on the Internet, so is the brand. We have a very strong brand which is based on our reputation as our clients perceive it. We have a really great rep[utation]. The great part about that is that the Internet is all about communication and connecting people. The stronger any type of social outlet gets, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, people talk about us, and they like what we do.”

Hill said that most of Liquid Web’s new ideas “come from my paying attention to our market, and thinking about what products make sense for users. With how quickly things move in our industry, we don’t design products based on the demands of today, we design products based on what we think people will need in a year, and a lot of that is just what will make sense for the operations of our clients.”

Hill says that being relatively young hasn’t hindered him. “I think you need to understand how to present yourself professionally, particularly in written skills. With me, it’s just been natural. I’ve got that drive. I’ve always wanted to move forward, and that’s what I’m committed to.”

Looking to the future, he says, “If Liquid Web ever stabilized to a point where it wasn’t growing as rapidly as it was, I’d look at starting other venues.” Then he adds, with a smile, “I like building things, not operating them.”