Slashdot Mirror
Should a Teenage Entrepreneur Sell Out To Facebook?
colinneagle writes "Andrew Mayhall is 19 years old and is running a server company, called Evtron, whose product has reportedly set the world record for data density (4.6 petabytes per server rack) and has begun attracting attention from investors. One of those interested parties is reportedly Facebook, with whom the young CEO claims to have had casual discussions about a potential acquisition/hire agreement (Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on the talks). He says the opportunity to speak with Facebook was simply one he couldn't pass up, and seems more impassioned by entrepreneurship. He speaks often of building his company into an EMC or NetApp, and could very well compete with them soon. But if an offer from Facebook ever comes, should he accept, or try to build something on his own?"
Sell for $5mil and be done with earning a living. Relax and enjoy the rest of your life.
I asked my teenage daughter (the demographic that drives all technology spending) if she or her friends use Facebook anymore. She said almost never - they use Instagram to share pictures, and some other services I can't remember right this second. Is Facebook in danger of falling off the MySpace cliff?
Don't sell...license.
And have plenty of beer money for when he goes to college.
If one hypothetical things happens, should you do some other hypothetical thing? Sure. Why not.
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Just by making this public you've hosed your leverage Andrew.
What's cooler than outer space?
>> if an offer from Facebook ever comes, should he accept?
Yes, but...
>> One of those interested parties is reportedly Facebook, with whom the young CEO claims to have had casual discussions about a potential acquisition/hire agreement
...I wouldn't count on that now. Yeesh.
Sell, absolutely. Then take the money and build something even bigger.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
If he's not confident enough with his skills or his product to instantly say "hell no" he's better of collecting (assuming he can collect big enough) and use the money to invest in himself as he builds something he is that confident in.
Then again, I'm unemployed college drop-out and my girlfriend supports me, so what do I know?
No. OSS = nirvana.
I'm thinking about it, therefore I might be.
The answer is yes. There is nothing magical about putting off the shelf items densely packed. Once somebody sees it, it is not hard to reproduce. So, yes, sell.
n/t.
If Instagram can get 1 billion, why not get a piece of that pie? Someone offers you more money than you can spend in 10 lifetimes, you take the deal.
Easy: Sell. The big software companies often buy well overpriced, and with the money he makes from this he can easily start a new company, if he still likes to.
If he's ambitious and hungry for innovation, could he not use the money from Facebook to bootstrap something bigger? If it's just dumb luck, perhaps if his product is of any real value, and he doesn't sell, the big players might just jump in and roll their own faster, cheaper solution. Competing with them will be a different sort of job. Moving forward on his own may involve more work with Lawyers than with Technology and Innovation. So, the answer depends what kind of person he is. Some people are driven by the business end of things. Others want to innovate. Rarely is someone good at both.
as to what the best business strategy should be between two 3rd party companies?
.. use that as a Slashdot poll.
You might as well ask what I think your neighbor should give their kids for Christmas. Go ahead
Obviously we have not yet reached the bottom of the Slashdot story barrel.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It depends on the offer, but all tech has a shelf life so if Facebook wants to give you several million bucks for your idea and can retire before you are 20, why not? Without having to worry about money you can devote all your time to your next great idea.
Depends on the offer, doesn't it? Isn't it a little speculative to advise him whether or not to take a deal without knowing what it is? I mean, he already has 150k in funding according to the article, and presumably they wanted something in exchange for that money...
If he has a business plan that he and his investors feel confident in, he has the drive and determination, and he finds it fun, I say go for it. Of course, he could also sell and sink the cash into another venture, so he has less reliance on venture capital. Depends on how he feels about how far he can carry his technology versus come up with new ideas.
Personally, without having seen it, I think it's dangerous to turn down a boatload of cash for something that can get kicked out from underneath you pretty quickly. Of course, I'm not so brilliant Facebook is offering me millions, either.
The entire goal of any business is money.
Even if you like what you do. You can do it alot better if you have a big pile of money to do it.
Sell out now. And start another company doing the same thing if you wish.
The people who say money can't buy happiness have plenty.... The rest of us would feel alot better with some.
Unless you HAVE money already. Then loudly tell facebook to fuck off and enjoy your business if that's your thing.
so maybe you take down $5 or $10 million and you miss the magic second in which it could have been $50 million.
I can get through the weekend just fine on $5 million... and another 60 years.
the smart investor knows it's worse odds than a lightning strike to go for the last penny. even if you never have another good idea in your life, let alone one you can commercialize, have a deals lawyer in the room with you and work out a series of code taps under the table, and shake hands even if there's a little taste left on the table.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Let's say this is the best case scenario, that you actually figured out something in your garage, with little to no experience in other high density storage applications, that EMC, NetApp, and the other major players simply couldn't come up with despite having hundreds (thousands?) of very talented engineers. If you manage to get a patent on it (you don't have one yet... interesting) then just license the rights nonexclusively. But then again, hopefully you have at least one lawyer around to give you the same advice.
Worst case scenario, is you just "invented" something that is already patented (this is highly likely) and your visibility just isn't high enough to have the hellhounds attack yet. In this case, again, a lawyer is your friend.
I'd love to see a creative young genius like Mayhall become an independent force in the technology sector. But 21st-century capitalism just has no room for small independents. They can't get the money to grow. The capital markets like big names and known brands.
Go to local mall. Thirty years ago it would have been all mom+pop operations. Now it's all big-branded chains and franchises. It sucks, but that's the way it is. Sell out while you can!
If he has come this far by 19 he will only continue to create amazing things. Sell, don't work for Facebook, invest the money in another venture.
http://TheFireSays.com - Ohio's Source of Tech and Startup News.
Building cool hardware is great. Selling cool hardware is totally different.
If someone wants to buy you at a point before you sell, do it. The summary says you'll compete with EMC or NetApp. You won't. You're able to do what you're doing because you have time to think about the product. Someone else in the field can look at what you're doing and figure it out quickly. Someone like the people at backblaze.
Can you offer 24x7 support? How is your manageability and maintenance? Recovery? How are you going to make the thing? Those are basic questions. Are you going to sell direct or via channels? blah blah blah.
OTOH, if you get eaten by facebook you get to help them design and build their systems, which is great if that's what you want to do. The thing is, your story is what's getting you the PR, not your product. Leverage off that PR as much as you can, since it's all you've got right now.
If he wants to be an innovator then I'd say avoid selling out to a large corporation. If he doesn't sell out, but makes a deal to service Facebook, then his company could outlive them and he could gain income from servicing other companies. More businesses will benefit from his innovations and the world will be a better place. If he wants to be a venture capitalist entrepreneur, then sell out to Facebook, take the money and move onto different things. But keep in mind that when Facebook's end comes it will mean that his innovations in the hosting/storage realm will likely die with the company or be absorbed by some other company that is even less likely to share.
If Facebook was actually serious, he would have gotten a Non-Disclosure Agreement by now, as FB has way too much exposure to insider trading shenanigan penalties. I assume if he's seeking advice on slashdot, he has either already blown it or is prematurely bragging to a girlfriend.
Gently reply
In one of my many entrepreneurial classes in grad school I was asked this question, "Do you want to run the best company in your field or do you want to get rich starting companies in your field?"
Your own answer to this determines whether you are an entrepreneur or a business owner and there is no shame in either. Look to fellow tech icons for their actions and see which path suits your own personality best; Justin Frankel, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc, etc, etc.
You can become fabulously wealthy starting, building and running your own company. You can also become fabulously wealthy by selling your company (and then you can focus on doing it again and differently!). Try to also learn from startups that had mixed results after a buyout was refused; Friendster turned down a $30 million buyout offer from Google in 2003, Google offered $5.75 billion to buy Groupon (now worth 2.52B)
Do you want to be a bitch to facebook, or do you want to own facebook.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Has he developed a service or a feature?
The former has growth potential, is more valuable in the long-term and easier to monetize. The latter is valuable from a licensing / R&D perspective. Given his probable lack of resources and experience, it would probably be easier to sell his work to the highest bidder than spend years and tons of money developing it into something else that might equal the buyout value after expenses.
...unless you know your product won't/can't become and isn't worth more than they're paying. 5 million now is not as good as 500 million later; interest rates are low (lol). Possible exceptions are when you just want to get out, or need cash now in order to start a bigger and better venture.
You should know the answer before you ask the question if you're really entrepreneur quality.
If he doesn't sell to Facebook, then he'll give up control to a VC firm.
If he really wants to compete in the enterprise storage market, he'll need lots of money, so he'll be giving large parts of his company to some VC (or multiple VCs).
Hardware storage density is only part of the answer, no one buys Netapp or EMC for the raw price per GB or how many disks they can fit into a rack shelf, they buy for the hardware resiliency and software stack that surrounds the disks. So he's got a lot of work ahead of him to prove that it really is a viable solution.
There's probably not a whole lot of overlap between people that need 5PB of storage in a rack, and people that are willing to use an underfunded 19 year old's product to store the data. He's going to need serious funding to make any inroads into the increasingly crowded dense storage space.
If I were him, I'd take whatever money FB is offering and retire.
Is worth two in the bush.
So the storage is more densely packed, but you probably need twice the cooling to keep it from melting. So do you even save any space all things considered and do you use more power per byte because of this density?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Sell for $5mil and be done with earning a living. Relax and enjoy the rest of your life.
That's too young to retire. For one he doesn't seem like the guy who wold sit back. He'll be in tech somehow until he dies.
the Evtron Cell uses a lot of the same components that Facebook uses for its current storage infrastructure, but, because of "a little design change," the Cell is four times as dense.
If it really is just a "little design change", then he should take the money and run because someone else will have something better in a matter of months (if not already) and will blow him out of the water. Really. with all this attention, I'm sure there are folks who have stumbled on the same solution or one like it and just didn't think it was worth anything - until now. I've seen it happen in the 90s. You wouldn't believe how I kept seeing the same inventions popping up here and there - like IRC - I swear to God, I saw at least 3 different people "invent it" only to have someone completely different make the millions on it because he saw (and had the contacts) the commercial value of it.
It's called serendipity.
A 19 year old doesnt know anything about running a business. Also it is likely someone will beat the density in the near future, so sell if you get a fair offer.
Developing a product and running a company are distinctly different, and running a company is not easy.
If you're not interested in setting up a company then develop the product and definitely sell to Facebook. One of the nice things about Facebook if you're interested is Zuckerberg is so full of himself that he'll ignore advice from his board and overpay for something he's interested in: see Instagram. But don't take Facebook stock like Instagram did, take cash and get a Financial Advisor to invest it.
If you're interested in entrepreneurship, then don't sell. Find a partner at a business school or educate yourself on how to run a business through books or classes. Then see where you can take it. If the technology/product is that good, Facebook is not the only guy out there. You can develop the technology, find some good Marketing people or learn to network yourself, and get an in with many of the major web companies and license your product to all of them. That way your technology is not limited to Facebook (they'll keep it for themselves), it instead spreads aroudn the world but you still maintain licensing control. Get a good lawyer to draft up a good licensing agreement so you maintain control and you're all set. All of this takes money, but not so much that you can fund it via Angel Investors or series A Venture Capital Fund; an Angel investor is typically able to provide funding of around $100k-$500k if they're big and good, whereas a Series A VC can provide funding up to about $2 million, which is plenty to get the right network and people in place to take your product and turn it into a business. There is likely a university near you with a business school, and many have an entrepreneurial center of some sort to help people get their business off the ground; that's a great place to start learning how to create a startup and find a network of people with the right skills and connections to get your company going.
He's 19 years old for crying out loud ... pick a giant magic number like $200 mil or so, and go to work for them ... he can always become a billionaire later. Think of it as startup capital. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
... he shouldn't take business advice from Slashdot. It's filled with ankle-biters and mavens who are sure they've got all the answers despite not having ever been close to being in a similar predicament.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
>> Don't sell...license.
OK, some perspective from the "buyer" side. When I encounter a company with technology I want, I almost always attempt to LICENSE the technology, not buy the company. Why? Because I can usually get what I want out of the company cheaper and with less hassle than if I bought the company. (Think retaining/motivating employees, etc. too.) Plus, if I become a significant stream of revenue to that company, I can often dictate what the company does with the majority of its development resources if I'm needy enough; in effect, I can get that companies' other customers subsidize my desires.
That's multiple lifetimes worth of money. SELL. Don't live to work, work to live.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
idea. This guy is entrepreneurial, so why not?
Have a chat with Kim Dotcom.
Retire in New Zealand.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
And this is one.
Would the payment be in cash or Facebook stock?
...is ask a bunch of random slackers who have time to waste posting to Slashdot how to handle a multi-million dollar, life-changing decision.
If he's getting paid Facebook stock that he can't sell for two years, there's no telling how much it will be worth by the time he can sell it.
maximizing storage density isn't something that other competitors will have a hard time with, and they will have more experience with hardware design, and so will have lower production costs and longer MTBF.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
He should consider selling but for different reasons than others have suggested.
1. I work for what was once a very successful start up that a Fortune 500 company acquired, so I am an employee of the Fortune 500 company. I was not hired by the start up until near the time that the acquisition happened, so I was not around in the early days. However, one of the things I saw from the early employees was this supreme arrogance that the company was successful only because they were all geniuses and that everything they did afterward could not possibly end in failure. I know that a few of the founders, all of whom left after the company was sold, have tried to start new businesses and none of them have yet taken off. One or two of them might, but the jury is out. My point is that it's actually hard to build a successful business, but everyone who does it fails to recognize that they beat the odds and they become convinced that they simply cannot ever fail. There are a few guys who really can turn every business they start into a success, but most can't repeat the success.
2. It's really hard to compete with bigger, older companies. Mayhall may truly have the best product, but he may be limited in sales because some clients may prefer to go with bigger, more established companies just in case. The start up I briefly worked for was sold because the owners had basically grown the business as far as they could on their own and they needed a larger partner with more and (truth be told) better sales people if it was going to grow. After the buyout of our company, our sales went through the roof and we grew at a rate we could never have achieved on our own.
3. The insight he had to offer more density may be patented (I don't know), but someone else will eventually come up with the same idea even if they never see his patent. They might make it just different enough to get their own patent on it. Or they may simply willingly infringe it, gambling that they can win a court battle or that Mayhall won't have the money to stick it out in a protracted fight.
4. There are companies that didn't sell when they could have and they lost market share over things they couldn't see happening when they were at the top. There's always a risk.
5. Mayhall may well have the arrogance that youth has (ie. Zuckerberg) that everybody older than him is an idiot and only young people have any idea what they are doing and he can beat his competition because they are old and stupid. That may actually end up being true, but it probably isn't going to. He could always prove incompetent as the head of a larger company and make a lot of bad decisions. Jim Balsillie was king of the world for a while and now he's just the guy who ran RIM into the ground. Jim wasn't as young as Mayhall, but he certainly had the same "I simply cannot fail" attitude.
We all know Facebook stock is worthless. If you take stock sell it fast.
Full disclosure, I was screwed by the Facebook IPO.
An Instagram is defined as Facebook what paid for a Photo Touchup service. His stuff could actually make them more competitive. A bird in the hand is worth 5 of what some VC will claim you will make if you hold out for an IPO.
'Nuff said.
However... here's my reasoning.
World record setting technology in data density is worth more than Zuckerburg, or any other Capitalist, would ever offer for it. As long is this entrepreneur has reasonable and experienced guidance, he can turn it into value for far more companies and people than FaceBook the latest giant tech gobbler would ever offer. Unless there's a bidding war, and FaceBook comes out on top, Facebook could be the whale that funds this company's expansion.
The technology sounds like it could save data centers lots of money.
http://evtron.com/
Based on what I see on their website and how much I've heard about the company (Answer: Nothing and nothing) an offer from Facebook would be a miracle.
I have a feeling this high-density storage idea is just a creative way to stick as many drives in a rack as possible, which means someone will easily beat it in no time because, face it, advances by the big storage companies means drives are getting more and more dense every day. Also, it won't be long before someone else comes along with an even-more-efficient arrangement of hard disks in a custom-built chassis in a 48U rack.
If Facebook wants to buy what's on your drawing board, go for it. You have two viable options at this point:
1. Sell for as much as you possibly can. Get every penny out of it that they're willing to give. Then take that money, hire people smarter than you, and make something even better than what you sold Facebook.
Or,
2. Negotiate a payoff for your idea, and employment. Go work for Facebook and help them bring your dream to life. You'll still get money for your idea but you'll make it come alive through their bankroll. They'll hire on very bright people and bring in storage experts to tweak things. I know it might suck to watch them come in and change your pet project, but watch and learn. You'll learn from these people, see flaws you never took into account, get to know them, work with them, and (forgive the schmoozing business term) network with them. If you choose this option you'll have a few good things going for you:
a. A job. You didn't finish high school - if you don't start another business, there's sadly not much else you can do.
b. Solid work experience for a Silicon Valley company. This will pay off in the long run.
c. Relationships with people in the industry. It's invaluable.
c. Knowledge. You'll learn things you don't yet know about the storage industry and the tech behind it.
These are second-degree hypotheticals though. If you're talking about it publicly that means you haven't signed an NDA, which means they haven't made you an offer yet. Don't count your chickens before they hatch, but always look a few steps ahead.
Those who have one idea in a lifetime, and those who have trouble getting to sleep because the ideas keep coming. Which one are you?
If this is it, take the money (not nearly enough to retire on) and get a job (likely with Facebook as part of the deal). Then parley that resume into being an industry guru, and better jobs down the road. Some one(s) will offer you equity in their ideas and board/advisor roles and life can be good.
Seriously, chances of you succeeding in and being something more than a great startup are slim. A shift in the wind and suddenly everybody is selling high density data storage solutions, or someone comes out with some new technology that makes your company obsolete.
If Facebook is interested in buying you out now, take the offer now. Holding out for something better, or thinking you are going to be a huge success 5 years from now in this market climate is going to leave you standing with empty pockets and a lot of regrets.
Bottom line is if you succeeded in attracting one of the big tech companies in your teens, then think what having a few million in investment capital can do for your next big idea and the rest of your life.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
A smart guy like this has 1000 more ideas to invest in. He should sell if the price is right and reuse his money. Invest in real estate and future projects that will once again yield large numbers like he did the time. He obviously has flare so he should continu using it on his own terms.
citation
But really, the headline should've been "Shouldn't a Teenage Entrepreneur Sell Out to Facebook?"...
But not for Facebook - that sand castle started crumbling as soon as it went public. Wait for EMC or another storage vendor he would allegedly compete with come to him with offers Faceplant cannot match. As much as you cheap asses like to think it is a lot, $5M isn't. With recent market events, worldwide, it could be $1M even with careful investing. Not enough - keep building it.
How little? What's their special magic?
Facebook uses HP Proliant DL380 G7's stuffed to the gills with 600GB SAS drives. Each rack is crammed full of them.
Source: Me, I was in one of their active suites earlier this year and saw them with my own eyes.
Ask your lawyers, as I'm sure you should have some by now.
Maybe they are using 2.5" HDDs each of which has 8x less volume than a 3.5" HDD. That would be an easier exercise.
In either case, the drives are probably not hot-swap (unless you do it like a puzzle)
A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.
Before he talks with anyone else, he should probably file a patent app. Sounds like the public disclosure clock has already started ticking.
Bingo! This is what no one is talking about. He's either using drives (doable in theory but not in weight or power consumption per server rack) or solid state (cost prohibitive). The kid doesn't even have a web site, no any explanation as to his magical feats of physics by which he packs so much storage density into a single rack in a power/rack-weight/cooling footprint that is both sustainable and affordable. In short...he's full-o-crap.
The fantasy that he is going to compete with "EMC or NetApp" is so off-the-wall that is makes it hard to take anything else in this post seriously. It's like saying he has a better windshield wiper so he's going to compete with Toyota.
Oh hey, I'm in networkworld.
There's a lot of trash talk in startup circles (the, I work 120 hours per week and everyone in my team is a rockstar, kind. or, I'm sure my company will be worth 10x more than Facebook, kind. etc.) - but in the end of the day, $million dollar offers don't occur every day considering how many people are looking for exactly what you're being offered. I once had a $2M offer for my startup when business was good, but as soon as business went south for various reasons, everything is gone. I don't regret it too much - I got a nice job in a different company after my startup folded - but I'm not a millionaire now.
Yes, I'm sure you think your company will be worth $10B+ in a 5 years down the road right now - everybody does. And I can bet a big part of that perception is caused by the VCs and other entrepreneurs you talked to. Let me give you a clear answer to that as someone who has-been: even considering you're someone extraordinary, that's extremely unlikely. I don't mean to break your spirit, but you need a lot more than just being smart, hard working and charismatic to do that.
Of course, put another way, a successful business doesn't always ensure that the product isn't sh*t.
Have gnu, will travel.
should he accept, or try to build something on his own?
Err, hang on, he didn't build anything on his own. What entrepreneur does?
Caveat: I'm assuming he likes having his own business and wants to continue, not that he's looking to retire at 19.
Were it me, I'd pursue a business partnership with Facebook and then work like hell to meet their needs. The name you'll make for yourself and your product is better than any advertising.
Acquisition is a way to get paid for your work, but both the money and the fame are paid in a lump sum.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That should be self-explanatory....
Just ask Kevin Rose.
Am I the only one who's interested in what he actually did? Are there more drives in each box? Is the motherboard just smaller?
That's his business. I am against this trend of sticking our noses with moralistic attitudes on the tip of them into the decisions of every person. He knows what it would mean to him as an individual to sell or not to sell. We are all unqualified to know that.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Are you sure you are giving good advice?
casual discussions about a potential acquisition/hire agreement
That's a long way from an actual buyout. About half of big deals that are announced as done fall through. If you're not in a conference room at Wilson Sonsini on Page Mill talking to someone who reports to Zuckerberg, its not serious yet.
A pending patent is mentioned. That's not that big a deal. Anybody who's any good in Silicon Valley has a patent or two. I have six, two of which have produced significant revenue. It's unlikely that broad coverage can be achieved on a scheme for packing disk drives into racks. There's much prior art. You probably have a six month advantage over the competition. If that. Evtron doesn't seem to be actually shipping product. Compare what AmpliStore is actually shipping. The number of disk drives per rack is lower, but there are 40 computers in there, too. A storage farm with small ARM-based CPUs might cut the space needed for the compute power, but that's not exactly an original idea.
So take the money if you can get it.
Sell if the offer is good and in cash.
A niche product could hold out because it's unlikely anybody would want to spend serious money to control a new, unproven market niche.
Since this is a product with wide applicability, there's huge and obvious money to be made. Any big company could probably duplicate the technology (or an approximation) with some effort if they wanted to. I worked for IBM where it was common to throw several million dollars at an opportunity (these were considered "small" projects). With competition that has unlimited money to throw at a problem as long as they like the ROI picture, it's really tough to win. Again, possible if your product is easy to differentiate from your competition, but for something like a bigger bit bucket, any advantage can only be temporary.
Turn your temporary advantage into cash.
Should he sell out then?
Hmm....4.6TB/rack, let's assume he's using a standard 42U rack, and 2TB drives.
That's 2300 drives/rack, or 55 drives/U. I don't even think it's physically possible, let alone space for power, cooling, control and networking.
The only explanation is that it's compressed. So then it's not anything special.....
Here's some barely-better-than-napkin math on how long $5 Million will last you if that's your only income: YMMV depending on where you live (state taxes) and your investment strategy or risk tolerance.
...So that $5 Million windfall should give you the equivalent of about $100,000 per year for the rest of your life, if you manage it wisely.
You just made $5,000,000. Awesome! Now, depending where you live, capital gains and income taxes make about 35% of that go away.
You're now down to $ 3.25 Million, nothing to sneeze at.
Next, we need to invest it fairly conservatively, in dividend-distributing vehicles. Let's call the return $6% annual. So now you're making $195K just for enjoying life and watching the grass grow.
However, you need to account for future cost-of-living increases. Generally speaking, we're told to expect a 3% cost of living increase.. so you need to fund half of that 6% investment into your investment principal.
As to whether or that is "enough" - many factors come into play. $100K per year is not enough to support a family and home ownership in many parts of the country and I would recommend some level of prudence.
As to the original question.. my advice for the entrepreneur? Take the "bird in the hand", invest the $5 million as laid out above, and consider any job you take (or starting another company) as always having a $100K per year kicker. Certainly enough to boost you to retirement much earlier than without...
You stereotypers are all the same...
Sell. By the time you finally get your hard drive-based product hardened and ready to sell to the enterprise market, the entire storage industry will be turned upside down by the entrance of storage-class memory using memristors and phase-change memory (PRAM) with petabytes of near-DRAM-speed non-volitile and byte-addressable RAM per server. Most HD-centric storage companies will become expensive legacy systems in the span of a few months.
i assume one would spend time doing this because of ... M O N E Y! .. right? that why one would do this? .. whatever ... charge some monies for it and M O V E O N! ... stacking harddisks?
naw, seriously, methinks it must have been fun
sell it, support it
there's more in life then
don't make this "the single best-biggest thing" in your life.
4PB/42RU means very dense disks. That's going to weigh close to a tonne, literally. The places EMC/NetApp go will have floor loading limits and thus will not necessarily be acceptable. That type of storage density can pretty much only be stored on the ground floor, or rather the floor where what's underneath is planet earth and not air.
OK, so he figured out a way to stuff a bunch of hard drives in a server rack; apparently more than anyone else has (yet) figured out how to do. Did he cut some corners? Does it have proper heat management? 4.6PB is pretty useless if it can't run for more than an hour before turning into a pile of molten slag.
He claims it was "a little design change" to get 4x the space.
I think my bullshit detector is going off here.. hold on a sec.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Then absolutely, SELL. Bank it. If you're brilliant enough to set data density records at 19 years old you're going to be able to do a lot of interesting things. Once you've successfully sold a single company, investors open their pockets. You'll have a lot easier time starting FUTURE companies and innovating for the rest of your life if you never have to worry about earning a living distracting you. The older you get, the more you'll find the the biggest barrier to entrepreneurship is time. If you're need to earn a living is out of the way, you've just banked yourself a ton of time.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
You just pushed the kid to what I call as "Slashdot advice paradox"
Facebook doesn't care as much for the company as it does for the guy.
Facebook usually buys for talent (the smaller joints anyway), which is the smart thing to do in the top tier web business.
Personally, I'd sell and join FB. They've still got bizar amounts of cash in the bank after their maximum-gain IPO and are into all kinds of crazy stuff like building PHP JIT Compilers and shit. Sort of like Google a few years ago. Sounds like tons of fun to me. And he can still leave and start a new company if he gets bored in a few years. He'll have gained tons of connections and experience. It's win-win all around.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Please see backblaze's "open source" version of a storage server:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/
135TB on 4U for $7500 which will exceed the 4.6 PB per rack.
19 years old and called a "teenager" ? No wonder people are living with their parents until they are forty.
If you have a multiple million dollar negotiation on the table, let 'em sweat a little. Never take the first two offers. If they offer you a better, third deal that would let you retire at age 20, you might want to..., take it! There's a saying that goes, "A piece of the pie is better than no pie at all".
Two chicks at the same time.
Why do you think zuckerberg has fought off every attempt to be bought out or even be a minority stock holder?
Not nearly enough has been presented to demonstrate whether or not the technology is truly compelling or not. Is this purely a storage enclosure, or is there some type of cpu/mainboard for which this can be used as a high density, low cost SAN? Why type of bus/connectors/interfaces are used? Does this use fiber channel or 10Gb Ethernet? Can the full potential of all the drives' IO and IOPS be realized? What is the latency involved? Also, what's so specialized that the technology can be patented, and not easily replicated by a competitor?
http://astutehosting.com/
That's a no-brainer for most entrepreneurs. If FB or any other entity with deep pockets comes throwing millions at you, especially at the age of 19, you take the money and pursue another venture, rinse and repeat. Of course there will be failures along the way but with a hefty bank account you are now able to weather them fairly easily. Don't MySpace it and lose 5 million today (or whatever figure you want to insert) for the dream of 10 million in a few years which has a very good probability of never materializing.
I believe the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages of selling now verse waiting, particularly at his age unless he comes from mega-millions anyway. If I was given several million it would give me the opportunity to pursue the dozens of other projects I've dreamed about but not had the time, money or experience to take a serious shot at. Money and age are a definite benefit in his position.
This product doesn't quite add up.
I've watched the video of their presentation at DEMO and the concept is basically a 4U box containing 120 hard drives and has three fans on the front. They claim it takes 45% less power, 66% less space and 38% less heat output.
I can see that requiring less power for cooling would reduce the overall power consumption, but can't see how pumping the same heat out of three fans would achieve that. They also don't say how these drives are interfaced. Presumably there is some kind of controller in the box since there aren't 120 SAS connections coming out of it, but somewhere you have to have a server in charge of those disks and a connection with enough bandwidth to run them all. And then we need to know if there is any RAID intelligence in the boxes or if the server gets them as JBOD.
A latent existence
Unless you think this is the only brilliant idea you'll ever come up with, sell it!
A few very intelligent and lucky folks make their living coming up with good ideas and selling them to companies. Why stop at idea one? Sell the idea, make some money (even if it's not the greatest offer, that's ok), and then, come up with more ideas! Put this one on your resume, and start thinking big. Use the money to support yourself and your next idea.
The reason to not sell it to facebook (or some other big-time data face) would be... to develop your own company yourself? That will be nothing but pain and suffering. Sell the idea. Facebook has the money to take it to the next level.
Absolutely - sell. You will carry the cloak of awesomeness throughout your whole career (he sold his company for $5million when he was 19!
The next phase in growing a company is EXTREMELY challenging. Learn how to do it on somebody else's dime. Then start another company when you're old (like 25).
Look at Elon Musk. Start company, pretend to have big future and sell after someone says the right number. Then just do what you actually wanted to do.
~ Best man at your service.
I don't know where all of this Facebook employment stuff came from but the option of selling out to them has sure as hell not been put on the table.
It depends on how you define "real money".
I know a handful of people who retired or could have in their 20s and 30s with their earnings as "employees" which is real enough for me.
Senior technical employees can retain 0.25 - 0.5% of a venture funded company at the time of a liquidity event which is taxed as long term capital gains (currently 15% Federally) which leaves them with about 85% of it in the Seattle area, 80% in Denver/Boulder, and 75% of it in Silicon Valley to enumerate a few hotbeds of tech startup activity.
2B * 0.0025 * .75 = 3.75M * .04 = $150K/year for life
OTOH, if you define "real money" as private jets and celebrity parties there are more opportunities to get there as a founder than working your way into a CEO position at a big enough company.
Let's do a little math here.
This does leave a comfortable amount of space for ventilation, wiring, and RAID controller. You basically build a whole rack full of hard drives.
But this is extremely impractical. You'll need a fast interconnect between other computing node racks and this storage rack because all storage access to raw data has to go through this pipe. On the other hand, if you basically keep it one or two hard drive per computing node, then raw data never needs to travel across the interconnect, and you get better locality as result.
I once had a signature.
...because if I had personally launched a business and suddenly a super behemoth of the internet wanted to buy me... I think I'd want to hold out and find out why. And as someone much older than being a teenager; I'd advise caution and multiple advice. Who are they (Facebook) and why do they suddenly want you? (Ask yourself that question, slowly and carefully.)
Just wondering....
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
there's no "magical feat".. the enclosure is 45" deep:
http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/none/303516-demo-fall-2012-infrastructure-products
All he supposedly came up with is an "innovative" way to cool it... which will be copied (in an ever-so-slightly different way to avoid the patent) in 5 4 3 2 1...
An offer of a few million dollars is quite common for just talent acquisition. It's extremely unfair for the rest of the world, but it's also no biggie.
Sell out, save a chunk of the money and invest the next in your next idea.
How did he do it? Software, hardware, the details. I came here for the technical details, a link to sourceforge and how-to would be appreciated.
Apparently the 19 year old is on the left in the photo.
I don't care about Barack Obama; I want to see that guy's birth certificate!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Need I say more?
What exactly would these teenagers be selling? I am certain LVM could be utilized to configure 4.6 petabytes of disk storage so unless they invented some new technology I fail to comprehend the hoopla.
Seriously, reading the PCmag article is enough to guess quite a bit about the hardware.
Comparing to a dataON DNS 1660, which is a 60 disk SAS2 DAS rig, this is likely also a SAS(?2) rig as well, given the enclosure length. Guesstimate based on the dataON rig consuming 20 inches in disk alone, you need 40 inches for 120 drives if you keep individual disk hotswapping, so Evtron has roughly 5 inches in the back for PSU/external connector board, compared to the dataON using roughly 15 inches. They may not allow individual disk swapping, but rather on a per row or per module/backplane basis, since the case doesn't look very hotswap friendly openable. That would recover some length. If you compressed the external connector board to 1U, perhaps slide part of it under the backplane proper, that gives you 3U for the PSU, which might allow you to shorten it.
I'm a little surprised they didn't rollout something for the 2.5 inch disk crowd, shrink down to 3U maybe.
All I can say is "Hello ZFS/Nexenta" folks. Though the pricepoint is gonna hurt, if the dataON pricing is any indication.
Start your own country
Casteism