What did you accomplish last summer? Here's how Vancouverite Brian Wong sums up his mid-year crisis: May: Laid off from job at Digg.com;June: Travelling. July: Look for new job. August: Decide to start a company. September: Land $200,000 in venture capital. October: Top it up to $300,000 after meetings with angel investors. Prepare for launch in first-quarter 2011.
Best of all, Wong is just 19. When he made his first trip to Silicon Valley last year, he had to take a train from San Francisco because he's too young to rent a car. But this is life on the young-entrepreneur edge. Wong graduated from UBC's Sauder Business School in April 2009. At 16, he had started a Web design company, Aer Marketing, with friends, and they developed an application for Twitter
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FollowFormation.com
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just to prove they could.
When Wong graduated, he tried to talk his way into a Silicon Valley conference for app developers. Shocked they hadn't reserved any free tickets for students, he asked if there was a way to get in free. Told only speakers get in gratis, he volunteered to speak -- as a developer of a Twitter app. He leveraged his Valley debut into meetings with various tech luminaries, including Digg founder Kevin Rose, which led to Wong's first real job. His subsequent layoff wasn't personal; Digg, a content-surfacing company past its prime, laid off 10% of its employees last May, and another 30% last month.
Wong felt adrift, wondering from where his next paycheque would come. He started working on a business idea he'd been nurturing, for a new model of embedded advertising in mobile gaming. (When you're 19, you believe, as Wong says, "everyone and their mother is playing Angry Birds." That game is now the No. 1 paid iPhone app.)
The result: Wong launched Kiip. me (pronounced "Keep me"), a stealth-mode startup dedicated to replacing banner ads with more organic, effective ads for games on the iPhone and Android. "We're trying to leverage the unique aspects of each game to create a new advertising model," says Wong. After raising $300,000 from True Ventures, a "very early-stage" VC in Palo Alto, Calif., and a number of angel investors, Wong hired a design team to develop the concept while he brashly lobbied game developers to come on board.
After lining up five game companies, he turned to Madison Avenue, commuting to New York to meet with big brands and agencies. In a presentation last week, Wong mentioned how he had hit it off with Pepsi's social media marketing leader, and how keen they were to work together.
How does anyone get so confident so fast? Wong says skipping four grades helps. "Ever since Grade 3, I started hanging out with people older than me," he says. "I picked up things very quickly. That's sort of my talent." When pressed, he admits his IQ was measured at 156 -- five years ago.
At university, Wong spent more time trying to meet interesting people than fretting over class work. His advice to young entrepreneurs is to network like a big shot. Wong has become an expert on figuring out e-mail addresses of chief executives, then asking them for a meeting or help.
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