We had a very interesting discussion about Chatroulette here last week. Since then, reporters at the NY Times got the founder to talk and they posted the email exchange here.
Here are some interesting facts from the NY Times piece:
- The founder, Andrey Ternovskiy, is a 17 year old high school student who lives in Moscow
- He created the site for "fun" and had no "business goals" for it
- It was inspired by his extensive use of Skype web chat with his friends
- It spread entirely by word of mouth
- He's had to rewrite the code several times in order to allow it to scale
- His relatives invested some "funds" so he could buy more servers
- Right now, he's doing it all himself
- Chatroulette runs on seven servers in Frankfurt, Germany
- He is planning to add more servers in new geographic locations
- Andrey has never been to the USA but would love to visit
- He has ideas for more "weird in a good sense" features
- He's not sure what Chatroulette is any more
- He thinks it would be best to "found Chatroulette" as a US-based company
I think we'll reach out to Andrey and offer him a visit to NYC. I'm still not sure if this is something we should invest it, but I'd sure like to meet this guy. He reminds me of many great young entrepreneurs we've worked with and his story sounds so familiar.
