Yahoo's Multi-Million Dollar PR Campaign
There’s a growing trend for children to be used as “PR tools” to raise funding or sell companies. Yahoo’s recent acquisition of Summly is the perfect example. A company built entirely off licensed intellectual property and questionable numbers of active users was purchased for “x millions of dollars.” In reality by the admission of insiders to the deal, the real value behind Yahoo’s purchase was improving their “PR image” and “human resourcing” to make Yahoo a popular company for developers to work for. It’s no secret that Marissa Mayer is making hiring the central piece of her management focus.
“Nick will be a great person to put in front of the media and consumers with Mayer to make Yahoo seem like it is a place that loves both entrepreneurs and mobile experiences, which in turn will presumably attract others like him.”An example of this strategy imploding is Andrew Hsu, founder of Airy (Comparing the current site to the previous version, it may be reasonable to assume that Airy has joined the deadpool) and a Thiel Fellow. Andrew was a kid that succeeded in grabbing the limelight, but failed in creating a real company or product. In the end, he became a puppet to older stakeholders– his father.
The problem with this trend is that a lot of startup groupies and “wantrepreneurs” start flying out of the woodwork to “go all-in.” But, then they say things like, “My developer wants a THOUSAND dollars! He’s insane!” Startup groupies and wantrepreneurs inevitably end up doing nothing because of fear and apathy. I lost $10,000 dollars on my last developer. It’s the cost of doing business and it’s a necessary risk.
But, not all young entrepreneurs are like Nick D’Aloisio and Andrew Hsu. Some of these whipper snappers are the REAL deal.
Emil at Demo Day
On other end of the spectrum is Emil Hajric. Emil was a 19 year-old kid from a working class American family that skipped college to get a head-start in entrepreneurship. He ended up fleeing the United States because he went broke. Emil arrived in Bosnia depressed from his nearly perfect streak of failures.
Emil’s story is a long list of failures that finally ended with Helpjuice.com. Helpjuice makes sure companies get less support emails & delivers instant answers to their customers via an auto-updating knowledge base software.
Before Helpjuice, Emil created failed projects like Bizteen.net at 15 years-old. It was a really sad version of Facebook that failed (Note: none of the technology was licensed). The interesting part of the story is that he was so broke that he couldn’t even afford to pay the domain registration. Emil got his start by having a Justin Vincent, a well-known developer and entrepreneur, purchase the domain and hosting for him.
Picopy was another failed project that helped watermark photos. An example of what this looks like can be found here. Emil discovered that his idea failed because photographers used something called “Photoshop.” He was able to learn this after following the advice of Patrick McKenzie, another well-known developer and founder.
You can tell that there’s a pattern in Emil’s early failures. They always failed for a different reason. Emil was smart enough to learn from mentors that were older and wiser to avoid repeating the same mistakes twice. More importantly, he kept his head down and kept trying. Failure was definitely depressing, but it wasn’t debilitating.
Emil got his first break after he was discovered by Capital Factory, a startup accelerator, based in Austin Texas. Capital Factor gave him $20,000 dollars of initial capital and further valuable mentorship to build a successful company.
Unfortunately, Emil failed again and burned through his initial capital after 8 months. Costs built up quickly, and Helpjuice was very early on. Emil was at a breaking point. He had little money and his parents were about to skewer him (remember he’s 19 and never went to college). This is the point where Emil decided to leave the United States. His family is originally from Sarajevo, Bosnia and he knew that it was cheaper to live in Bosnia, than Austin. So, he packed his bags and left Austin.
Fast-forward a year later, Helpjuice is growing revenues 30% month over month and Emil is moving back the United States with a profitable company that’s hiring and has several employees in Bosnia. Emil, now 20, spent the last year making sure Helpjuice reaches product-market fit, and working on Helpjuice’s marketing engine (some of his marketing work has been published online by marketing blogs) that attracts & converts customers.
I have nothing, but respect for this young entrepreneur. He’s suffered through the hard work and failures to achieve success. I wish that every wunderkind that I read about could be held to a standard equal to what I’ve seen in – Emil. All that’s left to say is – Welcome Home. Congratulations on all the hard work bearing fruit.
Edit: Please note, that I unfortunately used a photo that was unwise due to my lack of knowledge and understanding of Bosnian history! I removed the image out of respect and I apologize! Thanks!
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