Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/01/23/who-is-mark-bao-meet-the-18-year-old-entrepreneur-behind-threewords-me/

by dwynings • 16 years ago

108 59 16 years ago

thenextweb.com

Aetius• 16 years ago

Amy Chua would be proud ;).

Congrats Mark! I'm always happy to see young entrepreneurs do well.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

There are people that like working on things the rest of the world views as "accomplishments" even without parental pressure, y'know...

iag• 16 years ago

Gotta give credit where credit is due. Mark, congrats on successfully selling off Threewords.me. Best of luck in your next startup.

axod5• 16 years ago

Cool to see a writeup on a success :)

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

Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean anything.

citricsquid3• 16 years ago

> Just because you have a one word english name .com domain, doesn't mean anything.

It means he has money ;-)

axod5• 16 years ago

or he was just the first person to think of registering them...

markbao• 16 years ago

Thank you all so much for the awesome support. :) It's been a pretty insane roller coaster of a month, and I'm (unfortunately) starting college again in a few hours.

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.

hartror• 16 years ago

There are many conflicting viewpoints on college especially on HN. I took the view that college was an opportunity that while not impossible to be taken at a later stage isn't easy to "go back to" later. College is what you make of it and assuming you've gotten into a half decent school for your vocation you can get a lot out of being embedded with a lot of like minded people for a few years.

College won't exclude you following your entrepreneurial dreams at the same time and you can leverage a lot from the experience.

Good luck!

kmfrk• 16 years ago

People on Hacker News make a habit out of calling college a bubble, the Emperor's new clothes, and whatnot ad nauseam.

Disregarding the price tag, everyone tends to agree that the social and networking potential of college is a unique opportunity.

gsivil• 16 years ago

Mark, good luck with college and your startups. You will have all your life to be full-time entrepreneur. There will be always opportunities for talented and hardworking people like yourself. What college is going to offer you right now is the view of a parallel world to the one of businesses. Having an additional perspective to things can only help you in the long term.

Good luck with everything you do.

daeken• 16 years ago

I'm not really a part of the "startup community" here, but I've had some interaction with it and it seems to be pretty lively. If you're ever in town, shoot me an email/PM -- I'd love to grab lunch or somesuch.

maxstoller• 16 years ago

Mark, the startup community in NYC is thriving. It's a very exciting time to be in the NY tech scene. It's especially interesting as a CS student. Shoot me an email if you want to chat.

zds• 16 years ago

agree with max on this one. i'm at columbia and max is at NYU - i have worked with a bunch of NYC startups and can tell you that both the funding environment and the excitement around startups is second to none. we also have some great schools here if you're thinking of transferring.

Mz2• 16 years ago

I dropped out of college about the time I turned 20. I don't regret it but I think I did it pretty cavalierly, just sure that going back would not be a big deal. It was quite a lot harder than I expected and, at age 45, I still haven't managed to finish my bachelor's (though I do have an associate's, a Certificate in GIS that is the equivalent of master's level work, and a certificate related to my current job -- still, no bachelor's). I am not sure I ever will finish it. If things pan out, I'm okay with that. But it is something of an annoyance and I have basically been told it hurts me at work. (Which is also okay since I have other plans. I think the path I am heading for is better served by the road I have already traveled than it would have been by a college degree.)

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!

zaidf2• 16 years ago

To offer another data point, I took off at 20 after 2 years of school.

I returned to school at 22 with a lot more perspective and had a lot more fun. Just graduated too!

maxawaytoolong3• 16 years ago

If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin' dudes at Bentley.

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 $$$.

billclerico2• 16 years ago

Jared and Steve (founders of GroupMe) are some of the best entrepreneurs I've ever met. Your characterization is ill informed and just plain wrong. The fact that they were able to take a simple idea and implement it so successfully speaks to their ability as operators.

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.

mahmud3• 16 years ago

If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women.

I will freeze that comment in time, it might end up going on HN's tombstone.

jamesteow• 16 years ago

This might be the funniest comment I've ever read here.

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.

InfinityX0• 16 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly with SF being pretty difficult to meet women. I was there for six months and had a hell of a time after leaving college. I've since relocated to Seattle to work - and it's been incredibly easy comparatively.

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.

defen• 16 years ago

> NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women.

Out of curiosity, what is #1?

gordonc• 16 years ago

"Playing startup." Most apt description I've heard of the New York 'tech' scene yet.

iamelgringo2• 16 years ago

Dude, this is Hacker News.

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.

asanwal• 16 years ago

While venture capital investment is not the ultimate proxy for a city's startup'ness, NYC did just overtake Boston as the #2 for tech VC investment.

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.

mbesto• 16 years ago

Congrats Mark! I have no doubt you'll be the next big thing!

iamelgringo2• 16 years ago

Hey, Mark. Congrats on your recent sale.

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"

dadro• 16 years ago

Great work on your recent deal. In terms of your degree, I'd definitely consider sticking it out and finishing. I was in a similar situation, where I wanted to hack code and work on projects that interested me but felt like school was slowing me down. I decided to switch to p/t enrollment and ended up with a (Bentley) degree 6 years later. For me, getting the degree was less about learning and more about completing a personal goal. You also gain some killer networking opportunities in the process.

lzell• 16 years ago

Mark, congratulations on the sale and good luck with your future businesses. In the video linked above, you say that you don't know for sure what caused threewords.me to go big after a few days of little activity. Do you have any theories?

leon_• 16 years ago

Hmm, a guy gets lucky and sells a really simple website and is now an entrepreneur/hacker genius?

It's stuff like this that makes me wanna read HN less.

bourbaki• 16 years ago

First of all, forgive me for my english. I'm studying a lot for improve it.

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.

eswat• 16 years ago

You’ve explained what I was going to say clearly. Mark has worked on more than just threewords.me for the past couple of years. He’s not some guy that just got lucky with a simple idea and cashed in.

JoshSherrill• 16 years ago

You didn't read the article did you? It mentions several other projects he worked on prior to threewords.me.

Who is Mark Bao? Meet the 18-year old entrepreneur behind Threewords.me

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