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Comment by jolie | Hacker News Reader

To co-opt a now-famous phrase: Once you're lucky, twice you're good.

Does the kid have what it takes to replicate virality and social/gaming mechanisms across other platforms? Or will anything he creates hereafter simply be a cut-rate knockoff of Chatroulette?

Is he a good hacker/developer and a great social theorist? Or did he just get lucky with this one idea?

If the latter, would a stint in America - in the Valley specifically - hone his instincts and skills and lead to even greater success later? Or will he be a has-been by 2011?

So many questions, and I wish I could get the answers.

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This isn't really something that you'll be able to answer in any easy way.

Once you're lucky, it is much easier to be "lucky" again. Certainly, it will require skill on his part; but he'll have a brand and a name, two things that are much more invaluable than any sum of money he may get (although money of course won't hurt either).

The brand and the name alone will earn him followers -- lovers, and haters -- who will promote (in their own ways), whatever it is that he's making.

It is of course possible that he'll squander it all with some foolish mistakes and show that he was "just lucky", but I'd rather speculate about his success rather than his failure :D

Besides, he hasn't even finished this product yet, and you already want him to start working on something new? ;)

No, I'd like to see him perfect and monetize what he has created already.

None of those questions really matter, its not like he's an athletic sports prospect that needs to be sized up for draft day.

Ultimately, I think being in the valley will be beneficial for him. Kid should finish high school first though.

Are you kidding? Of course he's a prospect.

Young, fresh talent - geniuses, really - drive so much innovation in the Valley. They constitute a new form of capital.

If you think it's not a draft, then what do you make of "talent acquisitions" of otherwise worthless startups?

He's 17, hasn't finished high school, and you want to know if he can build the next Facebook? Why isn't it enough to just let him grow and be whatever is he was meant to be.

Why does it matter if he was lucky, if he has hacker skills, can be a "social theorist"? You write as if you believe he's this millenia's greatest young thinker.

Or will he be a has-been by 2011? What does that even mean? Are you buying into media hype that badly?

He's growing now. That's exactly what's happening. High School has nothing to do with it and appears to be a waste of his time.

What do you want him to do, drop everything he's developed and go study for pulse checks on whether or not he did the reading?

Don't get me wrong, I'm an academic and have great respect for the value of education, but the traditional system doesn't seem to have been much use for this guy and at this point the training wheels fell off a long time ago. You can't just expect him to go put them back on.

He can always go back to high school in 2011. But if he lost this opportunity to get funding and iterate fast to turn his product into a next-facebook, the opportunity is lost forever.

In 2011 he will be drafted into the army.

WTF? Visa is not equal to citizenship.

Yes exactly, he will be drafted into the Russian army because he will still be a Russian citizen. (Not sure what you're WTFing. Did you think he meant drafted into the US army?)

A VC would have a hard time answering those questions, and they are meant to be experts.

i'm not an expert in VC business but isn't the whole concept of venture capital built around initial risk with potential profit being directly related to growth prospects? now don't you think that the risk involved in funding this guy who single-handedly built a complex, scalable P2P site with a skyrocketing growth curve is much less than the risk of funding 99.99% of startups who have nothing but ideas, a "promising" team and very small traction. In comparison with the rest of the startup "market", he is an undervalued, steeply rising stock, a no brainer for any VC, really

If you're lucky enough the first time, you don't need to worry about the second.

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