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15-Year-Old Sells Startup To ActiveState
jcasman writes "Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he's sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size."
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Nothing pisses off /.'ers more than seeing a kid [luckily] achieve what they never have.
the kid is 15. Another few years and this wouldnt have been newsworthy. It's good to see young people taking initiative though. Not only did he have the business sense to do something, but it was obviously something someone else thought could be worthwhile enough to purchase. kudos indeed. I certainly wasnt thinking like this 8 years ago.
So its Heroku for perl devs?
Apparently that's what it looks like... except it's a 15 year old who dun it. FTFA:
Your app is launched into a securely partitioned environment on a cloud server. All CPAN modules required by your app are installed. MySQL and memcached are automatically set up, and connection information is exposed to you via environmental variables. In front of your app sits a Varnish caching server, quietly improving the performance of your app.
More in the article, but that's already pretty amazing.
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Born into being fed with silverspoon, using rich engineer Daddy's academic resources, name, and business connections is not at all impressive.
Correction: it's not as impressive as it otherwise would be. If the dad inspired his kid that much then he is impressive too.
Oh, come on. Many of us have probably have had the same soft of connections he does and never managed to accomplish this.
I didn't need to read the article to assume that was the case. You hear a lot of stories every year about genius children who discover something fantastic or start a company or a major project that makes them wealthy and/or famous and their parents are almost exclusively professionals in the same field that their child is "excelling" in. The lesson being that it's not some independent kid coming up from scratch doing something amazing - it's almost always a kid (probably smart and ambitious, still) who had a parent get them into the stuff in the first place, then support them, guide them, advise them, help them make contacts, help them find resources, have their friends and colleagues chip in where needed.
It's not to diminish the success, but to point out that the reason THIS kid did this and YOUR kid won't is that YOU probably don't have all the resources and connections to give your child from early on to guide them into this.
Who is more likely to get into a tech field early on, have the support and guidance from an adult, early on, and have the encouragement, connections, and resources so early on? The kid with the dad who is a robotics and AI scientist or the kid with the dad who works at a concessions stand at a ballpark?
It seems kind of obvious what DBIx::Class does.
What? No props to JizzMop, CumRag, and SpermBurp?!!?!?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Sounds like a deployment service. From their page:
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
AC's point is about the foolish equation of "researcher at University of Washington" with "rich engineer, silver spoon and business connections". A university researcher is not necessarily an engineer, and both research and engineering positions are well within the bounds of middle class in the western world. The kid may well have advantages in the tech field over the concession-stand dad, but a silver spoon is not one of them.
Doesn't seem like 'luck' had much to do with it, unless you are referring to the definition of luck which says "Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity..."
:)
Would be it that *I* had been as knowledgeable and motivated at his age...
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
I can't even sell a piece of junk on Ebay
Becky Shaw abstract artists
This is kinda neat. I know it's a copy of what Heroku and co have already done, and I've no love of PERL, but give the guy some cred. 15 year old or no, if this all works as stated it's a nice piece of hackery.
Cloning a VM is amazing? The real magic(tm) is in creating the VM the first time. (something my coworkers learned recently when I made them build the windows vms for virtual center, domain controller, etc.)
He appears to have written some scripts / programs to automate a highly complex process. System admins have been doing that for as long as computers have existed. He's managed to get someone to buy his creation -- for an undisclosed amount that isn't likely to be the billions the /. crowd is making it out to be -- and that ain't bad. Me? I tend to get paid for the shit before I write it. (but I'm an old fart... I don't write code for fun.)
" I made them build the windows vms"
You heartless bastard!
Got Code?
who cares, it's Perl.
Fuck Perl in the ass hole with a big rubber dick then break it off when it's halfway inside. Enough about Perl.
The important take-away from this story is that this businessdude is A) not female and B) not black. I don't have to RTFA to know that. Neither do you.
Just keep tellin' yourself it's all a big coincidence you politically correct tool. Have fun with that!
i can't tell if thats a sexist nigger joke or a lament about the way we treat women and "brown people" different in society
they both work. it's like some kind of crazy quantum duality
Hey Daniil,
:)
Don't feel like you need to defend yourself against any of the trolling comments here (and in fact you're better off ignoring them). You're a talented young man - and anyone of any importance in the world is going to recognize that immediately. This guy is not important.
Congrats on your success. If you care to share how much $$ you made on the sale, we would all be interested.
Perl remains extremely powerful and one of the most versatile languages, even today. That said, the heavily trafficked and fairly complex 15,000 lines of code service I wrote when I was a kid (well, before drinking age) from scratch in 1998-2000 that powered everything up until 2011 is probably not the choice I would make if I were doing it all over again, today. At least, not if I were still starting out as I mostly was, back then. I made the mistake of choosing it as my first real language that I really did anything of significance with. Bad move for a language that makes it so easy to blow your own foot off with (and yet incredibly robust and flexible if you're experienced and it's just another tool you're adding to your belt). Over those many years, I considered another language a few times, but it always came down to not finding any other community that was as large and active as Perl's nor with the extensive public library of code to solve so many problems.
What surprises me is that someone half my age would have such an interest in Perl, in 2011. It's not sexy and python and ruby and everything else is being pushed non-stop, these days. Hell, Haskell seems more popular if you just go by the number of stories about it on tech news aggregators.
As to this kid "identifying fools and parting them from their money" . . . I don't get where you're coming from. He sold to ActiveState. It sounds more like he identified a possible demand to fulfill for people who use Perl. ActiveState is a Perl shop and their customers are primarily Perl people. It doesn't sound like he suckered anyone, but rather found a niche and filled it. In fact, it's one of the most suggested startup strategies. He didn't invent the wheel, but found a niche where he could apply a slightly modified wheel for a different audience. And it paid off.
Ignore the haters. They're jealous and/or stupid.
;).
I'm not surprised that a smart kid can do what you do especially now given the vast resources available on the Internet. There's just so much a person can learn online nowadays, the issue is more of what you want to learn and spend your time on.
When you get older you might find you have less energy and time to spend on your interests, and stuff might just not feel as interesting and exciting- you might get a bit jaded. The first time you eat ice cream is often much better than the 100th time, even though the ice cream has not changed.
So before that happens, have fun, stay motivated, keep doing stuff and keep finding cool stuff to do! And you might find you never get old, just older
p.s. try not to spend too much time on Slashdot - it can be a big time-sink...
No, No never do that. Some of us are still bitter (old/older) IT-janitors.
If you think this is turning way too hateful now just wait and see then.