Comment by Meekro
1 year ago
If the $30M ARR number is true, it's not hard to understand why he wants to talk about it as much as possible. Maybe if you come from family money, you can hear that kind of figure and yawn -- but as someone who came from poverty, I can tell you that this is like if the kid built a rocket out of spare parts in his garage and visited the moon. There's no words for how stunning this is, and everything else in his life must seem trivial by comparison.
I can't understand why the admissions officers would rather read an essay about a kid who volunteered at an animal shelter or something. Anyone can do that.
It has been trendy in Silicon Valley recently to use inappropriate accounting methods to measure ARR.
Joe, a regular guy: Makes $120k at his desk job
Joe, the businessman: Made $20k in 32 days, $228k ARR
Joe, who launched 5 months into development and did 60k in the first 2 weeks: $1.5M ARR
In all three of these examples, Joe's financial outcome is the same. This business does not have any longevity, and all of its revenue is from converting paid advertising of various kinds. It's still impressive, but is most likely a >10x exaggeration on even the lifetime revenue he makes from this. Which is of course circular, because the reason he's doing all this is to make a business out of monetising the audience of people who want to make money.
All of this is clever social climbing, but is clever social climbing the thing that should be rewarded by colleges?
um - I would. Colleges don't want to get panned for hiring a scam artist which is exactly what this is. Unlike VC where that skill is slightly revered.
The app is fake - at best its puffery, and the essay was littered with grammatical errors.