While some entrepreneurs make getting their startup company a success their life’s work, some accomplish this feat with the time they have after school. Such is the case of 15-year-old Daniil Kulchenko, who recently sold his startup cloud-based computing company Phenona to ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed terms.
Kulchenko intends to join Vancouver-based ActiveState in a strictly part-time role because he’s still finishing high school in Kenmore, WA. Pheona has not been launched publicly, but at the time of the sale ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland said the deal will help the company move into the field of cloud computing.
ActiveState was founded in 1997, making the company just one year younger than its new employee. Phenona was started by Kulchenko after he worked a contract job where he found it difficult to use a Perl web app with the cloud, and couldn’t find an already existing service on the market to meet that need. Kulchenko has been programming since the age of six with HTML, and became a freelance Linux administrator at age 11.
Kulchenko is hardly the only young entrepreneur to cash in on their technological savvy. In January 2011, Robert Nay, then 14-years-old, created the iOS game Bubble Ball that knocked Angry Birds out of the long-standing top spot as the “bestselling” free app, and in March 2011, 26-year-old Amanda Stocking became a millionaire, self publishing ebooks in the young adult vampire romance genre.
