Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me
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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.
College won't exclude you following your entrepreneurial dreams at the same time and you can leverage a lot from the experience.
Good luck!
Disregarding the price tag, everyone tends to agree that the social and networking potential of college is a unique opportunity.
Good luck with everything you do.
Just saying: If you are considering dropping out with fantasies that going back will be "easy" should you change your mind, don't be so sure about that.
Good luck and congratulations!
I returned to school at 22 with a lot more perspective and had a lot more fun. Just graduated too!
Oh, and congratulations on your graduation.
* (Technically, he was born the day after I turned 22.)
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 $$$.
I also don't think quality entrepreneurs base decisions about where to start a company on where it's easiest to get laid. Most quality entrepreneurs that I know have no problem meeting women wherever they are because they are passionate, outgoing, interesting people.
Also, GroupMe's major investor is Khosla Ventures, which is a west coast firm. So I am not sure how that speaks to NYC as a "dumb money" scene.
If you don't think it's important to get laid, good on you, you've transcended to the next level of hacker zen. If you think it's easy to get laid in Silicon Valley, you are a bartender with a huge dick, not the VP of Product for Whatever.com.
As a New Yorker I am allowed to call bullshit, too.
As a former New Yorker transplanted to Palo Alto, I can attest that there are less girls here, but I have not had trouble meeting them.
Why is drinking and listening to jam bands reflective of their ability as a company? I can cite many examples of famous entrepreneurs who have well documented episodes of drinking or using drugs. Steve Jobs would be the most obvious.
Good job on meeting girls in PA. The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina. That may not be your "type" but it's better to broaden your range than hold out for what you think is your best match. It's not like in NYC where there's a match (or 10) for everyone.
Sadly, I think sometimes my posts come off as mean-spirited. I consider myself sort of a forum comedian who tries to throw some wisdom in while being entertaining. I wasn't trying to disparage GroupMe. I actually like and use their service! On the other hand, I also don't think anything I said is factually inaccurate!
And yet, your totally wrong and snarky comments above get up-voted. Go figure.
"The secret of dating in SV/SF that I wish I knew when I moved there: the women are all in Palo Alto, Pac Heights, and The Marina."
And you said you were here for 10 years? Based on the amount of real-estate you devoted to talking about getting girls, I'm guessing you're not too good at it. Yes, it's harder to get girls in SF than in NYC, but the people droning on about it are as hopeless in SF as they are anywhere else.
Meeting girls has not really been a problem either. Palo Alto has Stanford, tho its girls tend to be way too smart for me. SF is the world's most promiscuous city (SF State girls are great!), and Berkeley is a huge college town.
Moreover, what happened to love and quality relationships? What I'm getting across from your comment is basically mindless one nighters and the entire getting laid gig. Sure there are some places on earth where it's better to do that, but love, true love, can blossom anywhere you go.
Further, your comment is the most disgusting thing I've ever read on HN. It's crass in all of the wrong ways and it reads like some 14 year old on steroids wrote it. If your self worth is determined by how many women you take to bed then, trust me, you will be a lonely man indeed.
That said I really hope that I misread your comments.
I will freeze that comment in time, it might end up going on HN's tombstone.
I have no further interest in discussing what aches the hearts of hormonal youth.
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!
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.
I can't disagree. I've lived in NY for the last few years and I have found it so much harder to find women in SF. Though, I'm sure some people will have contrasting stories.
I can't really posit why that is, besides maybe the depressing rain making finding a mate the only relatively common thing to do here. Or, maybe, the women's standards are way lower. Either way, it's easier.
Out of curiosity, what is #1?
Please avoid comments like "The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. "
Not cool, and not helpful to the level of discourse.
http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/new-york-mass...
As an NYC startup entrepreneur myself, I can attest to the fact that the level of optimism is very high as is the level of activity amongst startups, investors, etc. Some say frothy but (1) that's not specific to NYC and (2) people love predicting bubbles as a sport.
Come on down.
re: NYC startup scene
I'm pretty sure that you've been to Hackers and Founders NYC, but if not, they organize via http://twitter.com/hackersfounders . They get together the third Thursday of every month. Also, I've just found out that NYU has a Hackers and Founders door floor. :) If your interested, I can forward the contact info to you.
re: 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?
I'm sure you're going to be in the startup game for the long term. So, thinking about where you're going to want to be in 10 to 15 years, will taking 3 years off for a degree hurt you or help you?
Also think about location. Degrees really don't matter much in Silicon Valley. I'm not so sure about NYC or Boston, however. The culture was very much more "degree centric" out East when I lived outside of Boston.
There is a ton of BS in college. And, frankly, you, in particular don't need college to be an entrepreneur. You might pick up a good bit more about algorithms or data mining or NLP than you would if you're a self taught programmer. But you are going to do very well as an entrepreneur with or without a degree.
But, even with all the BS, I completely enjoyed the time I spent taking fun classes. I always took a huge number of classes that I didn't need, simply because I was curious and wanted to learn. So, I took a ton of philosophy, comparative religions, sociology, psychology, literature, art history, and design classes. Because of that I was exposed to a bunch of ideas that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. And, I think that's made me a much more well rounded person than I would have been otherwise.
But, then, I've been going to college on and off for 17 years, and I still don't have my Bachelor's. I'm sure that your parents wouldn't approve. Mom still reminds me every month that I don't have my bachelor's yet. As the T-shirt said, "I never let University get in the way of a good education"
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
It means he has money ;-)
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
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.
Congrats Mark! I'm always happy to see young entrepreneurs do well.
It's stuff like this that makes me wanna read HN less.
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.