

Selling a startup at the age of 15 - dkulchenko
http://dkume.com/selling-phenona

======
WiseWeasel
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.

~~~
wtvanhest
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.

------
streptomycin
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
That's entirely my father's (<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
Did you really start programming at the age of 4? That is incredible.

~~~
dkulchenko
5-6, yes. Started out with 90s-era web development (Perl/CGI and some basic
HTML).

~~~
outworlder
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.

~~~
saryant
If/when I have kids (hopefully a long ways off) I'm going to find a way to get
some sort of BASIC machine in my house. That's where I started (at about the
same age as you) and I still remember a long drive from Cheyenne to San
Francisco, sitting in the back seat of our van with a toy VTech computer and a
book on BASIC I found in our school library.

That feeling was _awesome_.

~~~
seclorum
My kids have my old Oric-1/Atmos machines (I got a couple spare, heh heh..)
and they love 'em. Nothing better than giving the kids a 'safe' computer to
use (no Internet!) and coming back to some wild creation a few hours later ..

------
kinkora
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
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
Words of wisdoms from someone wayyy beyond his age. thanks!

------
nchuhoai
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
He already sold a startup. He should enjoy college. Its awesome.

~~~
shantanubala
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.

------
yawnt
"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
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> 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>) and
Getting Real (<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/>) come to mind.

~~~
yawnt
thanks for the hints :D

------
adamkiss
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.

------
ggwicz
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
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
Cool, thanks man. Can't really pick classes now but heading into college I
can.

------
cmetlab
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
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.

------
hussa
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!

------
tnash
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
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.

------
grannyg00se
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.

------
chubot
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.

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

~~~
dkulchenko
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
Thanks. I agree with that. Can you refer some open source cloud management
projects.( like <https://github.com/nodejitsu> )

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

------
sbarg
Congratulations. Very inspiring.

------
markbao
Congratulations, that's awesome!

------
af3
"Iterate, iterate, iterate" -- for me, its the most important part. I think
sometimes people just drown themselves into the perfectionist cycle.

~~~
pagekalisedown
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
>"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.

