An interview with super young entrepreneurs
I am taking an entrepreneurship course for this semester. One of the assignment is to interview a successful entrepreneur to understand their key success factors and traits. I am so honored to have an opportunity to interview Max and Alex who are the founders of a blockchain-based DDoS protection startup called Gladius.
Let me introduce their company first. DDoS refers to Distributed Denial-of-Service. It is a common cyber-attack method aiming at taking down a website by sending a huge amount of requests to that website at the same time. Basically, when a hacker controls millions of computers to access a website at the same time, that website is under the DDoS attack. Some large websites like Google can absorb a tremendous amount of web traffic at the same time without any problem because it owns many servers. One way to protect a website from DDoS attack is to redirect those traffic to third-party service providers but they can cost a lot. Gladius tries to use a distributed model to lower the cost by giving tokens to an individual user in return for providing bandwidth. They have already raised more than USD 1 million while Alex and Max are still studying Year-2!!!
The first impression of them is that they don’t put on airs even though they have already become very rich. I have known Alex when he came to the Cryptocurrency Club meeting to share about his company. After a month, when I messaged him on Facebook for an interview invitation, he immediately accepted it. On the day I interviewed him, he also called another co-founder Max to come over as well. I still cannot believe they were willing to talk with an almost stranger for an hour, given that they work 95 hours on their startup weekly and only sleep 6 hours each night. They were so generous to share everything they know with me.
I think the most defining factor for their success is to obtain the right information at the very early stage. Alex started to learn the programming language Python when he was in 6th grade. Perhaps it ignited his entrepreneurial spirit since he could build something on his own. Most importantly, he could experience the power of technology which may be the reason why he first learnt about bitcoin in 2012 when he was 14 years old. He even convinced his parents to invest in bitcoin at that time which only cost $40 each. For Max, he also heard about bitcoin at the same time and started to mine bitcoin. Then, after Mt Gox got hacked and bitcoin fell from the $1100 peak to $200, he revisited bitcoin technology and started to think of any potential to use blockchain for building the next big thing.
The main takeaway from these two super young entrepreneurs is to learn new and cool stuff earlier!
