9 ms·

Selling a startup at the age of 15

139 points by dkulchenko 15y ago

chubot 15y ago
Wow, congratulations. I can't believe you started this at 15. I'd like to hear some details about the architecture and how you got it to work so quickly.
af3 15y ago
"Iterate, iterate, iterate" -- for me, its the most important part. I think sometimes people just drown themselves into the perfectionist cycle.
- pagekalisedown 15y ago
  I think it's the Steve Jobs effect. "I want to be as great as Steve Jobs, therefore I have to be as anal as he was about every last detail."
  - unimpressive 15y ago
    >"I want to be as great as Steve Jobs, therefore I have to be as anal as he was about every last detail." The problem with that line of thinking. (Besides the whole "Not iterating" thing.) Is that Jobs criticized others work. (Example: Wozniak built the AppleII really, Jobs just leaned over his shoulder to make sure he did it right.) In the absence of a magic design compass like Jobs, you'll have to iterate and test to see if your changes are worthwhile.
sbarg 15y ago
Congratulations. Very inspiring.
WiseWeasel 15y ago
Congratulations on your first successful venture, and best of luck on your new project. At your age, I was busy making just about every questionable choice possible, and while I don't regret anything, I admire your ability to stay focused and determined at that stage in your life, along with the confidence to experience life on your own terms that such an experience must have brought you. You will not have wasted much of your life living out someone else's plan. Know what I'd do, with hindsight, if I had successfully closed a company sale at that age? Go to a big college in a nice college town, party my ass off, take a bunch of classes in every subject imaginable, and see what interests me. Then, do something in that area, diploma or no. Not too different from what I ended up doing, but I may have been presented opportunities you may not have, and my goal was an eventual (probably mistaken) career at the time.
- tswartz 15y ago
  Definitely the best suggestion. He may not need to graduate to get a spot at a new company, but you learn a lot more than just books at college.
- wtvanhest 15y ago
  I wish people hadn't down voted you. Your point is extremely valid. College can be a great learning experience, in so many ways other than classes. Chances are if he ends up in College he will spend his time as efficiently as he did in high school. No matter what, he will probably love it.
nchuhoai 15y ago
Wow, impressive. I don't know your philosophies, but you would be a prime candidate for the Thiel Fellowship: thielfellowship.org I wish you best of luck and success for everything you do.
- wtvanhest 15y ago
  He already sold a startup. He should enjoy college. Its awesome.
  - shantanubala 15y ago
    Definitely! College isn't totally about the classes or the books. A lot of the experience is just being around a lot of people who are interested in the same subjects (and being around people who are interested in different subjects!). It can be a really enlightening experience to be around people who aren't hackers. I think from the perspective of skills and finances, college is becoming less and less appealing. But as a social and personal experience, college is becoming more and more valuable as a way to learn how to connect with people from diverse backgrounds. Even if your only goal in life is to make better technology, you still have to interact with people who aren't hackers, and college is an easy way to expose yourself to a very diverse group of people.
  - nchuhoai 15y ago
    It most certainly is and both are not mutually exclusive. He is 16, he can take it and then go to college when he is 18/19. The only reason why I am in college is exactly for that reason.
ggwicz 15y ago
I'm a senior in high school and building my own product, and this is very inspiring. My only question is about how you manage your school work with your, well, "actual" work. It's an issue I've had and after getting your hands on a real product and being able to build something cool, school work just seems so uninspiring and dry. Thoughts?
- dkulchenko 15y ago
  If you're in high school, you can choose your own classes, right? I find ways to challenge myself with schoolwork (taking college-level calculus, which is no picnic). Physics and history/political science interest me, so I have no trouble with being motivated to learn in those arenas. I'd be lying if I said I particularly enjoy homework, but I try to make it interesting.
  - ggwicz 15y ago
    Cool, thanks man. Can't really pick classes now but heading into college I can.
- sachingulaya 15y ago
  Think and plan about what you need to do when you're at getting ready in the morning, when you're in the shower, and when you're at school. Then you can work efficiently when you're at home.
markbao 15y ago
Congratulations, that's awesome!
tnash 15y ago
Very cool. I do miss all the free time I had when I was that age. I wish I had gotten into programming more seriously then, and had used that time more productively.
- AVTizzle 15y ago
  So true. 24 now, 3 months in to my New Years resolution to "get technical". I'm super satisfied with my progress so far, but have wondered once or twice about where I could be if I didn't stop at HTML/CSS in middle school.
streptomycin 15y ago
What I want to know is, how does a 15 year old in 2009 end up working primarily with Perl? That's basically where I started a decade before that, but I can't imagine that many high schoolers were coding in Perl in 2009.
- dkulchenko 15y ago
  That's entirely my father's (http://notebook.kulchenko.com http://notebook.kulchenko.com) fault. His favorite language is Perl, and he got me started on it many years ago (2000-2001?). I've recently moved on to Ruby, but Perl was my go-to for a long time.
  - positr0n 15y ago
    Did you really start programming at the age of 4? That is incredible.
    - dkulchenko 15y ago
      5-6, yes. Started out with 90s-era web development (Perl/CGI and some basic HTML).
      - outworlder 15y ago
        That's awesome. I usually raise eyebrows, even from colleagues, when I mention that I started programming at the age of 8. Of course, times were different back then. You had a computer that booted straight into Basic. You didn't need to install anything, register anything or even open up an editor. The prompt was your editor. All I knew back then was that there was this prompt and this manual. You typed commands, and the computer would reply with something (at first, just 'Syntax Error'). Then I discovered conditionals (and called my parents to show off). And got an assignment from my father - he wanted me to draw a grid that he could use to calibrate TV sets (TV was the standard display device for personal computers). I did it, after working for most of an afternoon. Some time later, I discovered the 'for' loop (or rather, finally understood what it was for) and rewrote all of it in 5 minutes and 4 lines. And the rest is history. EDIT: Even more impressive is that the author managed to keep himself focused and finished the job. At 15, I had already started the trend that would lead to a huge string of corpses of unfinished projects.
bbayer 15y ago
Very good article.i was wondering which resources did you use for learning cloud concepts.
- dkulchenko 15y ago
  Google + GitHub. The former is how I've learned near everything over the past 5 years; I can't remember the last time I bought a programming/reference-type book. The latter is invaluable for browsing through others' code and I find it to be the fastest way to pick up new concepts. Why look through theoretical examples when you can look at real-world implementations?
  - bbayer 15y ago
    Thanks. I agree with that. Can you refer some open source cloud management projects.( like https://github.com/nodejitsu https://github.com/nodejitsu )
kinkora 15y ago
It's nice to hear, for once, about acquiring companies not screwing you over. I've read countless HN articles about people getting screwed by their "potential" acquirer that I am now starting to feel apprehensive about getting acquired. Daniil, you did not exactly go much into the acquiring process for obvious reasons but any advice you can depart on us? I.e. what can we do to avoid the "rollercoaster"? Also, would like to hear about your experiences (bad and good) being a kid in the industry at that time and how you dealt with it. Anyway, congrats on achieving what most of us can dream of at a really young age.
- dkulchenko 15y ago
  Sure. About avoiding the rollercoaster, two things, and they go hand in hand: 1. Be realistic. Try to not let your ego get the best of you. 2. Look at the big picture. Sometimes you get so focused on one thing, you lose sight of what's around you. Evaluate everything that goes in: be able to compromise on some to win in others. About being a kid in the industry: it's really no different. You get additional attention just for being your age, but aside from that, everything else is the same. I like it that way.
  - kinkora 15y ago
    Words of wisdoms from someone wayyy beyond his age. thanks!
cmetlab 15y ago
This is really impressive. What are your thoughts on college? Are you going to ditch it all together and keep working on your startups, or are you planning on getting some degree (possibly from MIT/Harvard, trust me, you probably can)?
- dkulchenko 15y ago
  I haven't decided yet (still have about 7 months to do so). I guess it really depends on which direction life takes me, but I really can't commit to either option at this point.
adamkiss 15y ago
First: congratulations; doing something meaningful AND succeeding at the same time, moreover at that age deserves some congratulation, and some nods. Good work. Second: With rather good spirit and having something to say (obviously, you know your stuff), I'm rather surprised that your blog doesn't mention the obvious design inspiration, and even adds some copyright.
grannyg00se 15y ago
Congratulations. Not only do you code and ship, but you also write extremely well. That was one of the most coherent, no nonsense blog posts I've read in a while.
ckpwong 15y ago
Congrats -- when I was 15, all I thought about was the opposite gender.
yawnt 15y ago
"It took a few months of learning about network topologies, Redis, ØMQ, LXC, redundancy, distributed systems" <- what did you read exactly? books? blogs? thx D:
- dkulchenko 15y ago
  A lot of Googling, most of which concentrated on StackOverflow discussions. Redis and ØMQ both have fantastic documentation, so it's easy to get started there; LXC was really a matter of trial and error. As for the more abstract concepts (networking/distributed computing), I would start on a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing for instance) and click links and jump from article to article for hours. Books are great, but I prefer using solely online resources to learn; I find it to be a more efficient use of my time. Though there are notable exceptions: The Pragmatic Programmer (http://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer http://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer) and Getting Real (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ http://gettingreal.37signals.com/) come to mind.
  - yawnt 14y ago
    thanks for the hints :D
hussa 15y ago
Very impressive...I'm ashamed of being in the 30's and not achieved something that high...but I've been trying...if not 15 could be later one day...but your's is a great motivation. Congrats!

139 points by dkulchenko 15y ago

Wow, congratulations. I can't believe you started this at 15. I'd like to hear some details about the architecture and how you got it to work so quickly.

af3 15y ago

"Iterate, iterate, iterate" -- for me, its the most important part. I think sometimes people just drown themselves into the perfectionist cycle.

pagekalisedown 15y ago
I think it's the Steve Jobs effect. "I want to be as great as Steve Jobs, therefore I have to be as anal as he was about every last detail."
- unimpressive 15y ago
  >"I want to be as great as Steve Jobs, therefore I have to be as anal as he was about every last detail." The problem with that line of thinking. (Besides the whole "Not iterating" thing.) Is that Jobs criticized others work. (Example: Wozniak built the AppleII really, Jobs just leaned over his shoulder to make sure he did it right.) In the absence of a magic design compass like Jobs, you'll have to iterate and test to see if your changes are worthwhile.

sbarg 15y ago

Congratulations. Very inspiring.

WiseWeasel 15y ago

Congratulations on your first successful venture, and best of luck on your new project. At your age, I was busy making just about every questionable choice possible, and while I don't regret anything, I admire your ability to stay focused and determined at that stage in your life, along with the confidence to experience life on your own terms that such an experience must have brought you. You will not have wasted much of your life living out someone else's plan. Know what I'd do, with hindsight, if I had successfully closed a company sale at that age? Go to a big college in a nice college town, party my ass off, take a bunch of classes in every subject imaginable, and see what interests me. Then, do something in that area, diploma or no. Not too different from what I ended up doing, but I may have been presented opportunities you may not have, and my goal was an eventual (probably mistaken) career at the time.

tswartz 15y ago
Definitely the best suggestion. He may not need to graduate to get a spot at a new company, but you learn a lot more than just books at college.
wtvanhest 15y ago
I wish people hadn't down voted you. Your point is extremely valid. College can be a great learning experience, in so many ways other than classes. Chances are if he ends up in College he will spend his time as efficiently as he did in high school. No matter what, he will probably love it.

nchuhoai 15y ago

Wow, impressive. I don't know your philosophies, but you would be a prime candidate for the Thiel Fellowship: thielfellowship.org I wish you best of luck and success for everything you do.

wtvanhest 15y ago
He already sold a startup. He should enjoy college. Its awesome.
- shantanubala 15y ago
  Definitely! College isn't totally about the classes or the books. A lot of the experience is just being around a lot of people who are interested in the same subjects (and being around people who are interested in different subjects!). It can be a really enlightening experience to be around people who aren't hackers. I think from the perspective of skills and finances, college is becoming less and less appealing. But as a social and personal experience, college is becoming more and more valuable as a way to learn how to connect with people from diverse backgrounds. Even if your only goal in life is to make better technology, you still have to interact with people who aren't hackers, and college is an easy way to expose yourself to a very diverse group of people.
- nchuhoai 15y ago
  It most certainly is and both are not mutually exclusive. He is 16, he can take it and then go to college when he is 18/19. The only reason why I am in college is exactly for that reason.

ggwicz 15y ago

I'm a senior in high school and building my own product, and this is very inspiring. My only question is about how you manage your school work with your, well, "actual" work. It's an issue I've had and after getting your hands on a real product and being able to build something cool, school work just seems so uninspiring and dry. Thoughts?

dkulchenko 15y ago
If you're in high school, you can choose your own classes, right? I find ways to challenge myself with schoolwork (taking college-level calculus, which is no picnic). Physics and history/political science interest me, so I have no trouble with being motivated to learn in those arenas. I'd be lying if I said I particularly enjoy homework, but I try to make it interesting.
- ggwicz 15y ago
  Cool, thanks man. Can't really pick classes now but heading into college I can.
sachingulaya 15y ago
Think and plan about what you need to do when you're at getting ready in the morning, when you're in the shower, and when you're at school. Then you can work efficiently when you're at home.

markbao 15y ago

Congratulations, that's awesome!

tnash 15y ago

Very cool. I do miss all the free time I had when I was that age. I wish I had gotten into programming more seriously then, and had used that time more productively.

AVTizzle 15y ago
So true. 24 now, 3 months in to my New Years resolution to "get technical". I'm super satisfied with my progress so far, but have wondered once or twice about where I could be if I didn't stop at HTML/CSS in middle school.

streptomycin 15y ago

What I want to know is, how does a 15 year old in 2009 end up working primarily with Perl? That's basically where I started a decade before that, but I can't imagine that many high schoolers were coding in Perl in 2009.

dkulchenko 15y ago
That's entirely my father's (http://notebook.kulchenko.com http://notebook.kulchenko.com) fault. His favorite language is Perl, and he got me started on it many years ago (2000-2001?). I've recently moved on to Ruby, but Perl was my go-to for a long time.
- positr0n 15y ago
  Did you really start programming at the age of 4? That is incredible.
  - dkulchenko 15y ago
    5-6, yes. Started out with 90s-era web development (Perl/CGI and some basic HTML).
    - outworlder 15y ago
      That's awesome. I usually raise eyebrows, even from colleagues, when I mention that I started programming at the age of 8. Of course, times were different back then. You had a computer that booted straight into Basic. You didn't need to install anything, register anything or even open up an editor. The prompt was your editor. All I knew back then was that there was this prompt and this manual. You typed commands, and the computer would reply with something (at first, just 'Syntax Error'). Then I discovered conditionals (and called my parents to show off). And got an assignment from my father - he wanted me to draw a grid that he could use to calibrate TV sets (TV was the standard display device for personal computers). I did it, after working for most of an afternoon. Some time later, I discovered the 'for' loop (or rather, finally understood what it was for) and rewrote all of it in 5 minutes and 4 lines. And the rest is history. EDIT: Even more impressive is that the author managed to keep himself focused and finished the job. At 15, I had already started the trend that would lead to a huge string of corpses of unfinished projects.

bbayer 15y ago

Very good article.i was wondering which resources did you use for learning cloud concepts.

dkulchenko 15y ago
Google + GitHub. The former is how I've learned near everything over the past 5 years; I can't remember the last time I bought a programming/reference-type book. The latter is invaluable for browsing through others' code and I find it to be the fastest way to pick up new concepts. Why look through theoretical examples when you can look at real-world implementations?
- bbayer 15y ago
  Thanks. I agree with that. Can you refer some open source cloud management projects.( like https://github.com/nodejitsu https://github.com/nodejitsu )

kinkora 15y ago

It's nice to hear, for once, about acquiring companies not screwing you over. I've read countless HN articles about people getting screwed by their "potential" acquirer that I am now starting to feel apprehensive about getting acquired. Daniil, you did not exactly go much into the acquiring process for obvious reasons but any advice you can depart on us? I.e. what can we do to avoid the "rollercoaster"? Also, would like to hear about your experiences (bad and good) being a kid in the industry at that time and how you dealt with it. Anyway, congrats on achieving what most of us can dream of at a really young age.

dkulchenko 15y ago
Sure. About avoiding the rollercoaster, two things, and they go hand in hand: 1. Be realistic. Try to not let your ego get the best of you. 2. Look at the big picture. Sometimes you get so focused on one thing, you lose sight of what's around you. Evaluate everything that goes in: be able to compromise on some to win in others. About being a kid in the industry: it's really no different. You get additional attention just for being your age, but aside from that, everything else is the same. I like it that way.
- kinkora 15y ago
  Words of wisdoms from someone wayyy beyond his age. thanks!

cmetlab 15y ago

This is really impressive. What are your thoughts on college? Are you going to ditch it all together and keep working on your startups, or are you planning on getting some degree (possibly from MIT/Harvard, trust me, you probably can)?

dkulchenko 15y ago
I haven't decided yet (still have about 7 months to do so). I guess it really depends on which direction life takes me, but I really can't commit to either option at this point.

adamkiss 15y ago

First: congratulations; doing something meaningful AND succeeding at the same time, moreover at that age deserves some congratulation, and some nods. Good work. Second: With rather good spirit and having something to say (obviously, you know your stuff), I'm rather surprised that your blog doesn't mention the obvious design inspiration, and even adds some copyright.

grannyg00se 15y ago

Congratulations. Not only do you code and ship, but you also write extremely well. That was one of the most coherent, no nonsense blog posts I've read in a while.

ckpwong 15y ago

Congrats -- when I was 15, all I thought about was the opposite gender.

yawnt 15y ago

"It took a few months of learning about network topologies, Redis, ØMQ, LXC, redundancy, distributed systems" <- what did you read exactly? books? blogs? thx D:

dkulchenko 15y ago
A lot of Googling, most of which concentrated on StackOverflow discussions. Redis and ØMQ both have fantastic documentation, so it's easy to get started there; LXC was really a matter of trial and error. As for the more abstract concepts (networking/distributed computing), I would start on a Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing for instance) and click links and jump from article to article for hours. Books are great, but I prefer using solely online resources to learn; I find it to be a more efficient use of my time. Though there are notable exceptions: The Pragmatic Programmer (http://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer http://pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer) and Getting Real (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ http://gettingreal.37signals.com/) come to mind.
- yawnt 14y ago
  thanks for the hints :D

hussa 15y ago

Very impressive...I'm ashamed of being in the 30's and not achieved something that high...but I've been trying...if not 15 could be later one day...but your's is a great motivation. Congrats!