I expect this to be one of the stranger stories you’ve heard about recently.
It’s about a startup that just raised millions from top investors. Now it stands a good shot at beating the odds and becoming successful. But that’s not the strange part…
What’s so strange is how darn young the founder is, the bizarre place he started his company — and what it can teach us about becoming successful early-stage investors.
Let’s dive in.
A Teenager Sells His Startup
In 2020, a 13-year-old named Eric Zhu was bored.
It was the height of the pandemic, and Zhu had little to do at home in Carmel, Indiana. So he joined a bunch of group chats on Discord, the discussion app.
One of the groups he joined was about startups and venture capital. Other members included OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Inspired, Zhu launched a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools. Just ten months later, boom — Esocial was acquired!
Zhu then joined Bachmanity Capital, an early-stage venture fund. To do research on potential investments, he pored over private-market data from established companies like PitchBook and Crunchbase. But he soon discovered that these companies didn’t offer any analytics — the kind of analytics that would make their data truly useful.
So he started a new company called Aviato…
A Big, Profitable Market
Aviato is an analytics platform for private-market data.
Like Crunchbase and PitchBook, Aviato tracks data points like private company’s funding rounds and headcount. But it also includes info such as company credit-card revenue data and employee vesting schedules, and it tracks where top engineers are working.
Private equity firms and venture-capital funds spend tens of millions of dollars creating similar databases, so Aviato is clearly going after a big, profitable market. In fact, just this month, BlackRock acquired Preqin, a provider of private-market data, for about $3.2 billion.
The thing is, Zhu was still in high school. And now that the pandemic was over, he was back in class. So he had to figure out a way he could take meetings to get customers while he was at school — and figure out a way to start making Aviato successful.
Here’s what he did…
Wait — Why Does He Have Braces on His Teeth?
Zhu got himself a green screen and a ring light to provide good lighting, and he created an excuse to be excused from class on a regular basis: an upset stomach.
Then he set himself up in the stall of his high-school bathroom and took video meetings.
Eventually, he landed major venture funds as customers, including NEA, Republic Capital, and 8VC. He also landed an angel investor: Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund.
Here’s how Bahn described the “bizarre” video call he had with Zhu, who was 14 years old at the time:
“He had his braces on. He clearly looked quite young, but he was oddly mature. The really strange part is he was clearly in the bathroom stall as a high school freshman, and I was like, ‘Where the f*** are you right now?’ I literally said that. He said, ‘I pretended that I had diarrhea, so I think I have like 30 minutes to chat with you.’”
Bahn made a $3,000 investment, and joked that he was probably flushing it down the toilet.
But now that Aviato has matured — with $2.3 million in new funding from major investors including Soma Capital and Softbank, and an expanded leadership team that includes senior executives from LowerMyBills and LendingTree — this is no joke.
This company has a serious shot at success.
His Mom Is Confused, But We Shouldn’t Be
Zhu says his parents are confused about what he’s doing. His mom still hopes he’ll become a doctor. But Zhu is laser-focused on his startup.
“We’ve built a product, and a lot of people like it,” Zhu explained to TechCrunch. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity funds and more. I want to sell to every single person that works with private markets in general. We will be able to replace PitchBook.”
Is it strange that the founder of this startup is only seventeen-years-old? It sure is.
Is it strange that this startup was founded in a high-school bathroom stall? Definitely.
But as investors, this is the type of founding story that should catch our eye — and potentially inspire us to write a check. This is a passionate founder with domain experience and grit.
But a founder with domain experience is only one of the crucial attributes we look for in our startup investments. To learn about the others, check out our free report: The 10 Crowdfunding Commandments »
Happy Investing.
Best Regards,
Founder
Crowdability.com
