19-Year-Old Squatted At AOL For 2 Months 141
New submitter mrnick writes "Eric Simons, 19 years old, was working at incubator Imagine K2 in Silicon Valley, which was hosted at AOL's Palo Alto campus. His grant money eventually ran out, but his access badge kept working, so he moved into AOL's office. He slept on a couch, took showers and washed clothes in the office gym, and ate for free in the cafeteria, all the while working on his new start-up. He was able to get away with this for two months before being discovered by security guard."
AOL still exists? (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't this a success story? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the ultimate goal of the incubators: to get young kids to spend their whole life working on their startup...
Re:That's nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:AOL Offices (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.techspot.com/news/42121-60-of-aols-profits-come-from-misinformed-customers.html [techspot.com]
We are talking about people who are so helplessly uninformed that they are paying for dialup service despite already paying for broadband. Working for AOL is basically working for a scam that is tricking older, less technically literate people out of their money.
Re:AOL still exists? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly beats the Graphing Calculator story (Score:3, Insightful)
See http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ for a corporate culture that managed, at one time, to embrace and extend that kind of enthusiasm. That's what you get when engineers are ultimately being understood as running the show rather than beancounters.
devil's advocate... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ad one:
"Simons said he was able to score $50,000 in seed funding from Ulu Ventures and Silicon Valley VC Paul Sherer."
Now Ulu Ventures and Paul Sherer is someone thanks to this CNET article.
Ad two:
"Now, Simons said, he's looking to raise an additional $500,000."
Yep there it is. "I slept on a couch in AOL, can i get $500,000?"
And just in case you missed it, his startup name, ClassConnect, is mentioned 6 times in the article. 6. When really, it didn't need to be mentioned at all, the story is about the kid hiding in AOL, not about his startup. It's even in the topic tags at the bottom.
Someone's profiting from this, besides the kid. Writer obviously, probably several others.