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."

Comments

...and now ActiveState gets mass publicity

[Gr33nJ3ll0]

Slashdot's work is done!

the story here....

[metalmaster]

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.

Re:the story here....

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense, but the only thing stopping you is the belief that you can accomplish your goal.

Follow your dreams if you have them, don't wait, life it way too short.

I didn't wait, because my family wasn't exactly rollin' in the cash and at 13 I mowed lawns, and at 14 I did the early am paper route thing and hated it, so I started 2 businesses while still in middle school (only to be shut down by my school administration through a ban on my products), and in high school I started another business that I ran for 7 years before moving on and starting another business, and another, and another.

I never got rich, but I had a freedom that can't be had in the academic or business world, so I repeat as necessary, and life remains fresh and alive , no midlife crises necessary because I've already been living it for decades, which far more important than money.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with starting a business and selling it for big bucks, I'd love that too, but it's a rare thing, so I don't spend my energy pursuing money, just the semi autonomy being an entrepreneur can bring one.

Re:the story here....

[slackbheep]

I was several times more impressed with William Kamkwamba.
http://www.ted.com/talks/william_kamkwamba_on_building_a_windmill.html

Re:Heroku

[rsborg]

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.

Re:Undisclosed size?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Undisclosed size?

[deodiaus2]

Oh, come on. Many of us have probably have had the same soft of connections he does and never managed to accomplish this.

Re:Undisclosed size?

[Seumas]

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.

Re:Name things better

[Seumas]

It seems kind of obvious what DBIx::Class does.

Re:"Cloud-based"

[bill_mcgonigle]

Sounds like a deployment service. From their page:

So what is Phenona?

Imagine this. You've spent hours and hours coding the perfect Catalyst (or Dancer, or Mojolicious, or, hell, CGI) application. You're using DBIx::Class with a MySQL database to store user info, and memcached in front of it for performance.

You now want it out there, for the world to see and use. Here's a deployment scenario for a good web application:

      1. Get a server. These days you might go for some slow shared hosting, or maybe a VPS, or perhaps EC2 or Rackspace.
      2. Install Perl and spend a few hours installing all the dependencies of your project. (Ever installed Catalyst before? It's not for the faint of heart.)
      3. Install and configure MySQL, set up users, permissions, databases.
      4. Install and configure memcached.
      5. Set up a backup, redundancy, and failover solution. What would happen if your server went down, data was lost? You'd need to set up more than one server, do failover between them, and do regular backups to protect valuable user data.
      6. Set up cron jobs and background worker processes to work on long-running jobs.
      7. Set up a caching server, such as Varnish or Squid, to improve performance of your app.
      8. Secure your server, open the necessary ports for outside access.
      9. Deploy and test your code.
    10. Manage system updates, app monitoring, and downtime yourself.

Hours, days, even weeks of time. Potentially hundreds of dollars. Or you could type this:

cpanm Phenona
phenona create MyApp
git push phenona master
phenona deploy production

Yes. Those four commands encompass every one of the bullet points I listed above. The final command inserts your app into the grid.

Re:Huh

[capnkr]

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... :)

I suck

[beckyshaw]

I can't even sell a piece of junk on Ebay

Re:Undisclosed size?

[TheLink]

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...