
Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me - dwynings
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/
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markbao
Thank you all so much for the awesome support. :) It's been a pretty insane
roller coaster of a month, and I'm (unfortunately) starting college again in a
few hours.

The interesting part of all this is that it's actually helping me develop my
next step. Not in terms of startups, but in terms of life. In other words, is
college something I'm sticking with long-term? Or is time of the essence and
the need (and my parents' need) for a degree less vital?

Edit: also, how good is the startup community in NYC? I love the city, but not
sure about the startup environment.

~~~
maxawaytoolong
If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay
in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the
chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a
boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most
ballin' dudes at Bentley.

NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as
when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.

Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion
dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see
all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could
count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours
a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at
startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would
be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near
chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on
your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich
dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.

The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid. There is a lot of dumb money.
For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and
has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys
working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands
around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually
think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar
for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup
wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to
Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.

(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble
where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks,
and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in
NYC)

I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the
conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that
make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like
Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and
DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out
at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC
market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to
be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.

~~~
mahmud
_If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay
in college is to meet women._

I will freeze that comment in time, it might end up going on HN's tombstone.

~~~
charlesju
I actually found it significantly easier to meet women outside of college. I
was a Computer Science major and all I did was go to my classroom with all
males and work on my hw/projects with all males. Further, as you get older,
you have more and more women you can date.

~~~
mahmud
I have been upvoted for some unknown reason. My point was that such a crass,
anti-intellectual comment is what is killing HN.

I have no further interest in discussing what aches the hearts of hormonal
youth.

~~~
fooandbarify
I agree that one of the cool things about HN is the level of discourse, but
the idea that geeks must be social luddites should die. There is nothing crass
about wanting to meet women in college, nor is it anti-intellectual.

~~~
mahmud
Nothing wrong with it; but saying 4 years of your youth + $100k + all the
opportunity to learn and grow is somehow worth wasting just for the sake of
meeting "girls" is stupid.

There are women HNers too, but you don't hear them say boys are the highlight
of the university experience.

~~~
todayiamme
>>> There are women HNers too, but you don't hear them say boys are the
highlight of the university experience. <<<

Thank you. It's just shocking to me that no one called him out. The very idea
that the central purpose of college is sex, sex and more sex is just
disgusting. I'm not a prude by any means, but seriously what is this guy
advocating?

I know that this comment really doesn't add much to the conversation, but I
just can't help it. This conversation is the last thing I expected on HN, and
I haven't been around for that long!

~~~
true_religion
Maybe its my background (non-American by heritage) but most people that I know
met their life-long partners in college. It was _not_ a time for serial sex.

Let's face it, companionship is important in life and college has a high
concentration of people who are of similar age to you, relatively unattached,
and of similar backgrounds or at least passions.

Now, turning to a cynical note---many if not most people think that college is
useful as a certification that one _can_ learn, and is intelligent enough to
_work_. A university education is required for a good job. If you already have
a job, or money then to this group of people the only reason to attend college
is love of learning or socialization.

I love learning, but lets not pretend that socialization is college is non-
existent or even an insignificant part of the college experience.

~~~
todayiamme
A part of an experience != To the very purpose of an experience

------
iag
Gotta give credit where credit is due. Mark, congrats on successfully selling
off Threewords.me. Best of luck in your next startup.

------
axod
Cool to see a writeup on a success :)

Doesn't say what everyone wants to know though - how much it sold for.

Also this is funny and sums up the domain name business for me:

> "He finally sold to Kevin Ham, an Internet entrepreneur who owns 300 million
> in domain names including God.com and Satan.com."
    
    
      god.com gets no traffic
      satan.com fares even worse
    

Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean
anything.

~~~
citricsquid
> Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean
> anything.

It means he has money ;-)

~~~
axod
or he was just the first person to think of registering them...

~~~
citricsquid
They're worth a lot of money, so my thinking was if he didn't have any money
he'd sell them, although I guess maybe they're a super long term investment if
he did just register them.

~~~
axod
My original point though, is that they're only worth money to people who think
they're worth money - domain speculators and 'cherished name' buyers.

To anyone else, if you think about it with a clear head, they're fairly
worthless.

What is god.com? It doesn't get any traffic, have any users or product. If you
bought it, you'd still have to find a way to get people to go there.

Yes, you _could_ build a brand/product/service around it, but then you could
just choose some other name for your brand/product/service.

The web is literally full of domains like this.

    
    
      insure.com  $16m  Alexa 39,000
      sex.com     $12m  Alexa 24,000
      fund.com    $10m  Alexa 602,000
      beer.com    $7m   Alexa 374,000
      diamond.com $7.5m Alexa 103,000
    

So none of these get any real traffic, some are just holding pages asking for
other silly people to buy them for millions.

~~~
citricsquid
So you wouldn't rather have irc.com than mibbit.com when you were starting
out?

~~~
axod
Certainly not. Despite the fact that irc.com would be blocking yourself into a
specific protocol and not building a brand, I doubt anyone here has ever
thought to go to irc.com.

I think building it around irc.com would have actually worked against me.
People see <familiar word>.com as mostly holding pages/made for adsense sites,
as well as being "web 1.0".

I did buy a domain - ircatwork.com. I bought it because it had users and
traffic - things that are worth money.

------
lzell
Mark, congratulations on the sale and good luck with your future businesses.
In the video linked above, you say that you don't know for sure what caused
threewords.me to go big after a few days of little activity. Do you have any
theories?

------
Aetius
Amy Chua would be proud ;).

Congrats Mark! I'm always happy to see young entrepreneurs do well.

~~~
nostrademons
There are people that like working on things the rest of the world views as
"accomplishments" even without parental pressure, y'know...

------
leon_
Hmm, a guy gets lucky and sells a really simple website and is now an
entrepreneur/hacker genius?

It's stuff like this that makes me wanna read HN less.

~~~
bourbaki
First of all, forgive me for my english. I'm studying a lot for improve it.

I don't know Mark Bao personally, I live in Europe, but I really know a lot
about he. He is not Lucky. He is so young, and have already created a some
tech-company. 3words.me is only one of those, and was selled in few months.
And nobody cares about how simple is an idea. The idea are worthless, the
execution and the sociological effect are all, in a simple idea like this.
Perfect execution, incredible effect on a lot of people. So, he is a good
entrepreneur, and he will improve day by day.

~~~
eswat
You’ve explained what I was going to say clearly. Mark has worked on more than
just threewords.me for the past couple of years. He’s not some guy that just
got lucky with a simple idea and cashed in.

