Wunderkind "threw" investors $ 30 million venture capital investment

In June 2013 a 21-year-old graduate of Stanford Daplen Lucas (Lucas Duplan) drew $25 million of venture capital financing venture to develop mobile payment systems. It was the largest round of seed-funding in the history of Silicon Valley. Thus at Daplena had no experience, no finished application.

Lucas Daplen founded a startup Clinkle back in 2010, at the age of 19 years. Apparently, even before he graduated from Stanford early in the specialty "Informatics» (computer science). Since then, the startup has worked in the "Covert" mode and no light in the press until 2013.

By and large, it all started in April 2013th with article in Wall Street Journal , where talks about "a young child prodigy "Stanford, who managed to draw in your startup a top 10 university students (they left the university for promised six-figure salary and generous stock options . As it turned out, Lucas promised to distribute stock options to 20% of attracted investments.

In the WSJ article was written that some university professors also invested in a startup.

People are still debating how Lucas was able to attract the best students and university professors. After the WSJ article in investor circles began hype around Clinkle, so getting investment was, in fact, a matter of technique. But as he assembled a team? The site Quora someone объясняет, How could this be possible. They say that through his supervisor Lucas came on top Stanford Computer Science professors and asked them to recommend talented students and programmers.

Through the same scientific advisor (luckily, it was authoritative VMWare co-founder Diane Greene, pictured) entrepreneur came to venture capital investors of the fund A16Z (Andreessen Horowitz), and then on the other. As a result, the financing of connecting multiple companies, each made its relatively small share. It said Andreessen Horowitz, and Peter Thiel, Accel Partners, the company Intel, Intuit, former COO Facebook Owen Van Natta, CEO of Salesforce Marc Benioff, the founder of Qualcomm, VMware and many others. Total more than 18 investors participated.

The total volume of venture capital investments totaled Clinkie $ 30 million .

What happened next? In the autumn the 2013th published on Pastebin list of current and past employees , then followed by увольнение 16 people . Presumably, this occurred because of the signature of the collective letters demanding to Lucas explain options positions.

In March 2014, after 5 months of operation of the company resigned Barry McCartney, former CFO Netflix, the most respected man in the manual startup. After him went Josh Brewer, former designer of Twitter, after 1 week of work (probably the lightest head in the company, he realized the futility of this business faster than anyone).

In the end, the application with September 24, 2014 is available in Google Play and App Store . Now it is unclear what is in it such a revolutionary. The application is designed for students. They are tied to the payment card account online Clinkle and can transfer money to each other, as well as calculated from a mobile phone for sale. After each user to purchase the seventh award "treat» (treat) - Free coffee or ice cream. This "treat" can duplicate another. For each gift must also make payment through Clinkle-card.

Other ice Treat: viral dissemination scheme payment system Clinkie i>

Of course, the "viral" distribution scheme invites very beautiful, but it looks like it's only innovation. Nothing else distinguishes Clinkle from Venmo, Square and others.

Изображение profile Lucas Daplena program Clinkle, in January 2014 the first

For the first time after the program has not yet seen that it enjoyed great popularity. The average score in Google Play - 3 points in the App Store - 4+.

In the world of venture investments occur sometimes real scam. The best of them - is such as to not undermine even the speculator. He mastered investments earned a lot of money, and the product "somehow" turned out not very good. Well, what do they say, tried as best they could.

Source: habrahabr.ru/post/239243/