19-Year-Old Squatted At AOL For 2 Months

New submitter mrnick writes "Eric Simons, 19 years old, was working at incubator Imagine K2 in Silicon Valley, which was hosted at AOL's Palo Alto campus. His grant money eventually ran out, but his access badge kept working, so he moved into AOL's office. He slept on a couch, took showers and washed clothes in the office gym, and ate for free in the cafeteria, all the while working on his new start-up. He was able to get away with this for two months before being discovered by security guard."

Comments

AOL still exists?

[crafty.munchkin]

I was sure it had died the death of 10000 cuts... not to mention all those CDs people kept microwaving!

Re:AOL still exists?

[betterunixthanunix]

AOL is still around, and there are still people paying for dialup service with them -- oftentimes people who are also paying for broadband service. AOL's brand is so strong among the technically illiterate that some people actually thing that AOL is the "Internet," is "Email," is "instant messenger," etc.

Isn't this a success story?

[JoeMerchant]

Isn't that the ultimate goal of the incubators: to get young kids to spend their whole life working on their startup...

Re:That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps he just wasn't smoking what you bunch were smoking.

Re:AOL Offices

[betterunixthanunix]

Especially when you consider this:

http://www.techspot.com/news/42121-60-of-aols-profits-come-from-misinformed-customers.html

We are talking about people who are so helplessly uninformed that they are paying for dialup service despite already paying for broadband. Working for AOL is basically working for a scam that is tricking older, less technically literate people out of their money.

Hardly beats the Graphing Calculator story

[Anonymous Coward]

See http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ for a corporate culture that managed, at one time, to embrace and extend that kind of enthusiasm. That's what you get when engineers are ultimately being understood as running the show rather than beancounters.

devil's advocate...

[iamhassi]

i'm sorry, maybe i'm just being negative, but by the end it sounded like an advertisement:

Ad one:
"Simons said he was able to score $50,000 in seed funding from Ulu Ventures and Silicon Valley VC Paul Sherer."

Now Ulu Ventures and Paul Sherer is someone thanks to this CNET article.

Ad two:
"Now, Simons said, he's looking to raise an additional $500,000."

Yep there it is. "I slept on a couch in AOL, can i get $500,000?"

And just in case you missed it, his startup name, ClassConnect, is mentioned 6 times in the article. 6. When really, it didn't need to be mentioned at all, the story is about the kid hiding in AOL, not about his startup. It's even in the topic tags at the bottom.

Someone's profiting from this, besides the kid. Writer obviously, probably several others.