20 Year Old Founder Jessica Mah Raises Over $1 Million For Indinero (YC S10) | Hacker News Reader

20 Year Old Founder Jessica Mah Raises Over $1 Million For Indinero (YC S10)

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153 pointsbwaldorf54 comments

Kudos to Jessica. I just hope ppl don't hype her beyond reason ('wunderkind', 'female zuckerberg' etc). That kind of pressure at such a young age can be crippling. Let her grow and succeed at her own pace.

Female Zuckerberg is a mixed blessing.

Nice to see someone to counterbalance the 'lack of females in tech' again, to land an investment like this at the age of 20 is quite amazing.

I think it's fairly condescending to bother noting that she is female and make out it's somehow a big deal.

Reminds me of Alan Partridge (Comedy show)... "A female drummer! Interesting. Close your eyes, could have been a man."

No, it's just that there is a 'too few females in tech' post every other day, so I think that it is good to see some balance to that.

For the record, the young males impress me just as much from a business point of view, it's just that for some reason young females succeeding in the tech world are much more rare.

Given the reputedly storied history of Zuckerberg and Facebook, I don't know if that comparison is apt to draw the most positive connotations from a lot of people?

On a side note...I don't know why the media generally feels the need to add these hyperbolic and largely tenuous comparisons - her accomplishments can stand on their own.

Journalists want stories that spread. Making hyperbolic comparisons help make stories spread.

It can be weird having stories with those type of comparisons made but I think it will help Jessica and the indinero team more then hurt.

I once had a way overinflated headline written about myself and since it has helped to open doors for potential jobs and such.

I ignore all of that crap and focus on building my company.

Good for you, that's exactly what you should be doing.

LOL :)

Of course you should, but posting this implies you don't, as trying to appear as if you don't care how you appear is the pinnacle of ironic falsity.

Good luck.

She's building a company and a good one too by the looks of it, you're blogging about building a company.

> I have a few web app ideas and the money to execute them, just not the technical know-how.

Are you sure you're not just a bit jealous?

She didn't respond, which I was hoping for because that means I'm wrong. I was just trying to offer some criticism, perhaps this is the wrong setting and her success is the focus.

Thanks to HN, I have a cofounder and our app should be out within days.

Of course she doesn't respond. Ignore the trolls.

It's too early to call this a success. But she's indicating exactly the kind of attitude that will increase the chance of success (ignore the praise and the detractors, focus on the work) and you berate her for that.

I think that's pretty cheap.

If you found your technical co-founder through HN then chances are that person has a lot more in common with Jessica Mah than with you, to slap the one is to indirectly slap the other.

Not everybody has enough money that they could pursue their ideas 'out of pocket' and to see someone that young pick up an investment this size serves as a validation of the fact that age does not matter in the start-up scene, and neither does your pocketbook. I think that's really inspiring for those that are young and not too wealthy, it shows that hard work is rewarded.

This sounds like a great product for lots of small companies that don't want to spend their VC on bookkeepers etc. Can you detail a bit about your product, services and target customer?

Having known Jessica for several years - she is the real deal, and she can handle the pressure. Some people are just made to do this kind of thing.

Second this. Worked at Indinero two summers ago -- she taught me rails :)

Just checking out Indinero for the first time... seems like a great product.

I've tried a number of products like this that replace a spreadsheet or a text document. Mint tried replaced my personal finance spreadsheet... Todo apps try to replace my text document todo list. This product tries to replace my company balance sheet that I have in Google Docs.

But I usually run into two problems. These products are great at first, for a bunch of tasks, but when I want to do something slightly different, I'm screwed. With a spreadsheet I just add another column. With something like Indinero, if I need to track something that the system doesn't allow for, I run into a wall and I have to start over with a whole new system. Massive data headache.

The second issue is that with a spreadsheet/text document, I have to type everything in, and manually update things, so I get intimately familiar my data. With Mint, I connected all my accounts and then promptly forgot it existed. The spreadsheet, because of the inconvenience of data entry, forces me to manually reckon my finances, which is actually a good thing.

I don't know how you get around those issues, but I'd be excited to see a solution.

From what I heard in the video indinero connects to your bank on your behalf as well and automatically imports the relevant data.

Jessica is amazing. From her profile: She’s been programming since age 9, building businesses since age 12, and finished high school at age 15.

pg wasn't kidding when he said they're more interested in impressive founders than they are in a specific idea. Can't wait to see what happens with Indinero next.

I totally agree.

Although, the idea also holds its own. It's one of those "wish i'd thought of" ideas that's refreshingly simple.

It's not actually that simple. Indinero launched with Canadian banking support which is very difficult to implement (for example mint.com has just done it in the last couple of months). Kudos to them for considering the businesses north of the border.

I think he meant that the concept is simple to grasp.

I always wonder why people get amazed when someone raises money for their startup.

Yes, it is impressive but it would be a lot more impressive if it was "20 Year Old Founder Jessica Mah Gets Over $1 Million In Profit From Her Bootstrap".

Try raising $1M.

Raising 1MM seems fairly trivial these days in the valley.

No thanks, I prefer to use my energy for the goal of getting $1M in profit. ;)

Maybe a stupid question but.. Where does the money go when a little startup or this kind of startup raise fundings ? in advertisement ?

Presumably hiring, mostly. Salaries can burn through $1M pretty quickly.

A million dollars really doesn't buy a whole heck of a lot. A 10 person company (which isn't that big, assume a CEO, three or four developers, a support person, a tester or two and a couple sales guys plus offices, incentives, and other expenses and you're north of a million in expenses per year easily).

Or another way to think of this...it's better to use this money to try and boot strap and hit profitability to grow out slowly and organically than use this as immediate ramp-up money to build out a huge team and hope that lighting strikes.

I love that you used the phrase boot strap in the same sentence as a million dollars...I understand the concept, don't blow the money on a big team, but man, for us people bootstrapping, selling possessions and hoping the $1000 a month salary turns into $2000 before there isn't anything left to sell...

Kudos to anyone bankrolling their own start, I've been part of a couple of those in the past and I hear you. My wife is trying to bootstrap a company in the same sense that you are. Instead of a million dollar investment, we've "invested" what her old salary was (she quit her job a few months ago to explore doing this).

But it's obvious that she's going to need some more money than that to hire a designer, a part-time lawyer, pay for hosting and probably get one more developer for what she wants to do...and we simply don't have the cash for that. So she's seriously thinking about looking for an investor to hire those people. A quarter million would probably cover those expenses for 18 months.

I don't know what to call that, "investor assisted bootstrap"?

It's definitely a different model than "I have an idea, give me money, I'll go hire 20-30 people and we'll make a go at it for a year", which is certainly not bootstrapping.

My own company tried that "instant company model" a few years ago and it didn't work out, so we reconstituted the company with different leaders and different VCs, and now are following this hybrid mixed bootstrapping model...and you know what? We're doing much better.

Well, most of that is solved by conceding equity rather than hiring an employee. Two people can realistically, if pushed really hard, produce something that can succeed. A part time lawyer...Are you doing something involving other peoples money? Designers are cheap on a contract basis, usually available for less than $5k, as long as you are fine with diving in and filling the actual gaps, starting all the CSS yourself, etc. Let the designer do just that, design, and if you are OK with an image of a good design rather than a fully implemented HTML/CSS layout, you can get by with MUCH less than $5k. Finally, our colocated machine is a mere $50 a month. Granted, it's on our own hardware ($2000 split between my other founder and myself), but it would have been less than $70 a month for dedicated leased hardware.

There are many options, depending on the type of business you are starting. I'd argue that some of the best heavily involve the founder(s), rather than farming out to other people, as it gets the founder(s) intimately familiar with the roles they will be hiring out later.

Engineers, hardware and services (such as bandwidth). Not necessarily in that order.

A start-up is no different than any other company in terms of expenses, and usually their expenses outstrip the earnings, especially in the beginning.

So typically you need to spend money on:

- an office (unless you're really tiny)

- people (freelancers, employees)

- overhead (legal, administrative)

- communications (phones, network connections)

- hardware (computers for your employees)

- office furniture (but second hand is fine)

- marketing

and so on.

Plenty of those are 'one offs', so they at least won't be back next month, but if you grow quickly there is more money in each of those categories in the first months to years.

Starting up can be expensive, depending on how labour intensive your company is.

Growth. Skilled engineers don't come cheap, when you're trying to steal people who are good enough to get offers from Google or Facebook.

Three reasons: 1) To hire and pay for costs 2) To have great people involved with building your company. 3) To have leverage for if you ever had to raise more money.

In addition to the usual list of costs in employees/hosting/office space, I presume since this particular product does integration with Banks, you would need funds to setup proper compliance with various security standards that are mandated.

I like the idea of the product but using it was another story:

a) copied Mint.com's look verbatim b) the functionality is horrible and extremely limited c) you can't delete your account and your data d) I question the 256 bit security they use as well

Reading this, as a 21 year old, I'm starting to feel like I really need to get cracking on something!

I'm pretty sure you can extend that range upwards quite a bit. People like Patrick (Collisson) and Jessica are really inspirational, I'd like my kids to look at them rather than at popstar 'x' as role models.

It's great to see young people achieving this much.

Perhaps I'm just weird, but the main feeling I have for people who achieve 'success' at a very early age is sadness. What sort of life are they going to have... The sort enjoyed by child actors? :/

(I'm not talking about anyone in particular, just in generalities).

I'm the opposite, not sad but happy. People that achieve success at an early age, assuming they're not doing it to satisfy the pressure from some parent or family member but simply because of their own desire to achieve something and / or change the world are absolutely great.

All that PG and company can do for people like this is open the doors for them and give them some monopoly money, they have to do all the legwork and make it happen.

I wouldn't compare this with 'child actors' or 'virtuoso musicians' at the ripe old age of 5, hardly any of them chose for that. But someone that's 20, that's a different story. They presumably do this because they want to.

Just give them all the tools they need and get out of their way.

And to call this a 'success' already is a bit early I think, there is a misconception that when you have received an investment that you already have a success. That remains to be seen, but there is a substantial chance of success and there is a person that wants to achieve that success.

Time will tell if it works out.

Jefferson was 33 when he drafted the declaration of independence, he had made many achivements before than and he would continue to achieve many things for the rest of his life.

I don't see why people who achieve success early in life shouldn't go on and achieve even further success later in life, unless there is some fixed amount of success each of us gets.

You're confusing correlation and causation. Because child actors often have troubled lives after they experience success, you look at two elements of the situation (youth and success) and decide those are the ones leading to the trouble. It seems much more likely to me that Hollywood culture is the "secret sauce" here.

It's more than that.

I'm a believer that you learn far more from failure than from success.

In an ideal world, I believe that people should fail a few times before their first success.

Having success early teaches you very little.

Enjoy your life. Just because some choose to do things at an early age, doesn't mean you should.

Just take a look at child star actors, and how they turn out in later life!

I dunno, but I think the whole "we are young kids" may be counterproductive in this instance.

It'll be great for getting coverage...but would that coverage be more or less effective? Would a 50 year old business owner who sees coverage in Wall Street Journal really want to put his business financial tracking in the hands of a bunch of kids who refuse to get off his lawn?

Congratulations Jessica and team!

I hope that seed money goes into building the product - I haven't seen the growth in the offering of inDinero over time that its story is capable of considering its working off the problems set already solved by Mint.

Consider it harsh criticism or motivation, this product is perfectly positioned and I hope to see it grow more/faster.

Did you just complain that a company that launched 2 months ago hasn't grown its offering fast enough? Chill out and give them some time.

inDinero may have "launched" 2 months ago, but its been around since 2007 if I recall correctly.

I'm impressed by it all, except strangely the product name.

The name seems to throw me off for some reason?

The name would be perfect for targeting the spanish market but worldwide will it make sense?

Or am I being silly?

Congratulations on the funding - it looks like a good product. :)

I just wish that some of these finance-startups would support European markets :(

I love the name of it "inDinero", and yes Spanish is my native language.

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