A Resourceful 15-Year-Old Raises $20 Million From a High School Restroom

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Today’s Highlights:

• 💸A Resourceful 15-Year-Old Raises $20 Million From a High School Restroom🚽

• 🖥️NeuroSculpt🧠

A Resourceful 15-Year-Old Raises $20 Million From a High School Restroom

It’s not uncommon for bored students at school to want to steal time and pretend they need to go to the bathroom. When teachers think they go to relieve themselves, many end up just chatting with friends or even skipping school altogether.

This isn’t the case for Eric Zhu, the 16-year-old owner of a $20 million fund, who goes on bathroom breaks to have online meetings with investors for his startup, Aviato.

Origin of Entrepreneurship

Zhu started building his brand as a 13-year-old, despite not even having a computer the year before. Having strict Asian parents, Zhu wasn’t allowed access to social media until he got a computer at the age of 13, which he used to join hundreds of Discord communities and started spamming them to look for jobs.

After claiming to be a 13-year-old coder and spamming discord servers, Zhu got banned from several of them but managed to achieve the goal of getting jobs. Around this time, Zhu learned to code with tutorials on the internet and coding classes for about two years. It was only after he started AcademiaEdge, a nonprofit organization that offers accessible and free programming classes, however, that he started to completely understand and dig deep into the subject.

Being quite active on Twitter, Zhu built his brand further when he piqued the interests of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and famed YouTuber MrBeast through quirky, viral tweets. Zhu then tried to catch even more attention, this time from investors and business professionals, and succeeded by hacking into their Google Calendars and scheduling meetings, with them not being able to resist and refuse a meeting with a skillful and nimble teen.

Zhu’s cunning act intrigued even more investors to meet him, and being a teenager still having to attend school every day, Zhu took his meetings in the crapper, literally. Zhu manages his classes and business deals simultaneously at school, starting out in the janitor’s closet at first, but he quickly got kicked out and resorted to the bathroom.

Bathroom Startup Act

After meeting with more and more VCs, the then 15-year-old Zhu met GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner and the owners of Sacramento Kings, who became Aviato’s first investors and helped Zhu raise $1M in pre-seed funding.

Aviato is essentially a search engine for venture funds, which allows users to filter through criteria and get alerts on startups and personnel changes to find the next unicorn. Zhu refers to Aviato as a hookup app between founders and VCs.

Aviato manages to do this by scraping public and private databases of over 11.3 million startups which they get through partners and investors. They then analyze the unstructured data and pipe the structured data into the front end.

Though Zhu’s bathroom act has brought forth massive success for Zhu, his principal hasn’t taken this kindly. Zhu would spend about 5 to 6 hours in the bathroom, only attending five to ten minutes of class every day, which eventually got him banned from using the bathroom during school hours without having staff escort him.

Staying ambitious, Zhu would occasionally have his parents call the school to say he has doctor’s appointments, when in reality, Zhu would go to a library near the school to take meetings with limited partners and family offices.

Investor Commitments

Aside from acting as the CEO of Aviato, Zhu co-founded a tech investment fund, Bachmanity Capital, with a friend and now also serving as General Partner. Bachmanity Capital is a Seed & Series A-focused generalist fund that also occasionally funds late-stage startups.

The San Francisco-based fund has $20 million committed in capital calls* and is currently holding $12M. Recently, Bachmanity Capital led the seed round of a mobile campus housing startup, Housr.

*Capital Calls: the act of collecting funds from investors and limited partners whenever the need arises.

AI-Generated Idea of the Day

NeuroSculpt

Have you ever thought of creating something so magnificent in your head, but you lack the ability or resources to actually make your idea come to life? Imagine a world where you will always be able to construct whatever it is you want with the help of technology.

Meet NeuroSculpt, a concept that fuses neuroscience and technology, enabling a direct connection between the human mind and digital innovation. NeuroSculpt revolves around brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that decode neural activity translated into actionable commands for digital systems.

By wearing wearable devices, smart glasses, and discreet neural implants integrated with BCIs, you can

• Sculpt digital creations with your mind

• Design anything without advanced coding

• Create through visualization

Lack of programming skills will no longer become a barrier to innovation, empowering individuals with physical limitations to engage with technology on their own terms.

NeuroSculpt can adapt to individual thought patterns by synergizing neurofeedback and advanced algorithms, allowing users to create deeply personal landscapes. The applications span from creative industries to education, healthcare, and beyond.

We stand on the precipice of a future where the boundaries between human creativity and technological innovation blur into a seamless co-creation of the digital world, with NeuroSculpt playing a monumental role in enhancing accessibility and democratizing technology for all.

Meme & AI-Generated Picture

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