Seattle area 15-year-old sells startup to ActiveState

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Manage Perl web apps in the cloud
http://www.phenona.com/

Seattle area 15-year-old sells startup to ActiveState

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/seattle-area-15yearold-sells-startup-company-activestate

Some entrepreneurs wait a lifetime to experience the thrill of selling their startup companies. Daniil Kulchenko, a Seattle area high school student, accomplished that milestone at the age of 15. Kulchenko today announced that he’s sold his startup, a cloud-based computing company known as Phenona, to Vancouver, B.C.-based ActiveState in a deal of undisclosed size.

Kulchenko plans to join ActiveState in a part-time role, since he’s still a student at Inglemoor High School in Kenmore. Phenona had not publicly launched at the time of the sale, but ActiveState CEO Bart Copeland said that the deal will help speed the company’s move into cloud computing.

“The technology, knowledge, and talent from Phenona will extend a key part of our cloud strategy while helping us accelerate our development in this fast-paced market,” Copeland said in a release.

Kulchenko started Phenona after working on a contract job in which he found it difficult to deploy a Perl web app to the cloud and couldn’t find a service on the market to meet the need.

He started programming at a young age, with The Register noting that he began tinkering with HTML at the age of six and became a freelance Linux administrator at 11. It also points out that ActiveState was founded in 1997, making it just one year younger than Kulchenko.

Kulchenko’s father, Paul, is an artificial intelligence and robotics researcher at the University of Washington.

We emailed with Daniil Kulchenko this morning about the deal, but he wasn’t available for a full interview because he was, interestingly enough, on his way to school.

In a blog post, Kulchenko writes that he’s received “immense feedback’ from Perl developers on the yet-to-be-released service. “… It’s easy to tell that the Perl community has long been searching for a simple way to manage Perl web apps in the cloud,” he wrote.