I love the story of Chartroulette. It is the classic story of a teenager doing something for fun to see it become a web sensation. It reminds of napster (without the copyright issues) and facebook. It has other issues such as profanity and vulgarity everywhere (so if can be ofensive to most people). But the concept is intriguing (and a subset of its current community, not all of it).
Fre Wilson, one of the noted tech VCs, wants to invite him to NYC.
Here are some interesting facts from the NY Times piece:
- The founder, Andrey Ternovskiy, is a 17 year old high school student who lives in Moscow
- He created the site for “fun” and had no “business goals” for it
- It was inspired by his extensive use of Skype web chat with his friends
- It spread entirely by word of mouth
- He’s had to rewrite the code several times in order to allow it to scale
- His relatives invested some “funds” so he could buy more servers
- Right now, he’s doing it all himself
- Chatroulette runs on seven servers in Frankfurt, Germany
- He is planning to add more servers in new geographic locations
- Andrey has never been to the USA but would love to visit
- He has ideas for more “weird in a good sense” features
- He’s not sure what Chatroulette is any more
- He thinks it would be best to “found Chatroulette” as a US-based company
I think we’ll reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. I’m still not sure if this is something we should invest it, but I’d sure like to meet this guy. He reminds me of many great young entrepreneurs we’ve worked with and his story sounds so familiar.
I think it would be a great experience for Andrey to get exposed to the US tech scene. But I hope he doesn’t get too comericalized and lose the curoisty and innocence. People love stories like this and it is only natural to hang out with sensations. I just hope that Andrey keeps his eyes on the ball. He seems like a mature teenager and reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg. I wish him the same success as Mark.
One of the commenters on Fred’s blog, Aviah Lor, says it well.
but he shouldn’t be institutionalized (yet). keep the artist side.
Amen.