There’s nothing I hate more than when teens are successful. Good for them, by all means, but at the same time: get fucked. It is truly staggering to contrast the thought of young people making mondo cash from their genius ideas with how when I was 17 my time was equally divided between sitting at my desk playing Age of Empires and lying on the couch wondering what titties looked like. It doesn’t add up.
Ben Pasternak is one of these miracle teens. Pasternak came into the public eye after the wild success of Impossible Rush, a stupidly addictive mobile game that he and a friend designed and built seemingly on a whim. He then went on to found and act as CEO for marketplace app Flogg, catching the attention of TIME, who named his has one of their 30 Most Influential Teens for 2016.
In yet another career milestone I couldn’t even dream of achieving within the next decade, the now venerable 18-year-old has reportedly sold video chat app Monkey to Chinese competitor HOLLA. The apps operate on relatively similar lines, pairing strangers off to have video conversations.
Chinese media is reporting that Pasternak decided to sell the app to allow their currently over-capacity development team to work properly on a different social app that is currently under development, messaging one of the owners of HOLLA to let him know Monkey was for sale.
There are no reports yet about how much the sale was actually for, but HOLLA underwent a “multi-million-dollar” round of funding in May this year, so we’re probably not talking a small amount of cash.
We’ll keep you posted on whatever presumably genius-level steps Pasternak takes following this monumental step from someone who only just very recently became legally old enough to drink.
Hey, don’t worry about it, whatever it is you’re doing is an achievement too. Maybe.
