• A Teen Secretly Lived in AOL Headquarters for Two Months
    8 replies, posted
[IMG]http://asset1.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/05/25/Eric_Simons_1.png[/IMG] [QUOTE]It was 6 a.m. when Eric Simons was jolted awake by the yelling. After working until 4 a.m, the 19-year-old entrepreneur had finally passed out. A few hours of sleep would help with the day ahead. But unlike most people working at AOL's Palo Alto, Calif., campus who were surely still hours from showing up at the sprawling complex, Simons was already there. He'd been living there for two months, hiding out at night on couches, eating the company's food, and exercising and showering in its gym. And now, with an angry security guard bellowing at him, it was all over. The story of how Simons, just two years removed from a Chicago high school, came to be living in AOL's Palo Alto campus could well become part of Silicon Valley lore, especially because it highlights the lengths some entrepreneurs will go to make their dreams a reality. And though stories abound these days of startup founders barely old enough to drink swimming in venture capital, far more have to get by on packaged noodles and the good will of friends with extra couches. Chicago You hear it all the time, but Simons, now 20, was a mediocre student with little interest in school. That changed one day when his high school chemistry teacher confronted him and demanded to know what she could do to get him interested. "I was stumped," Simons writes on the About Us page of his startup, ClassConnect. "She didn't ask me to try harder, she didn't ask me to stay after for help or study more -- she asked me to figure out how she could grab my interest. No one had ever bothered to ask me that before. A few moments later I replied, 'let's get everyone working together on computers -- I'll even build the software for us to use.'" His life as an entrepreneur had begun.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]$30 a month [B]Having spent several months legitimately working in the building, often quite late, Simons had noticed that although there were security guards with nightly rounds, there were at least three couches that seemed outside those patrols. Plus, they looked fairly comfortable. He claimed them.[/B] This was his routine: He'd work until midnight or later, and then fall asleep around 2 a.m. on one of the couches. At 7 a.m. -- and no later than 8 a.m. so he'd be safely out of his field bed before anyone else arrived -- he'd wake up, go down to the gym for a workout and a shower, and then go back upstairs and scarf a breakfast of cereal and water or Coke. Then he'd work all day, finally waiting until everyone else in the building had gone home before returning to one of his three favored couches. "I got a really good work ethic," he said, "and I got in shape, since I had to work out every morning." But the real point was that he was spending next to nothing. The first month, he spent just $30, mainly on the occasional trip to McDonald's or for "random food expenditures when I got sick of eating ramen and cereal. I could have not spent a dollar, but I was going crazy." Then, of course, there was Thanksgiving. That Thursday, to splurge, he grabbed dinner at a local Boston Market. "It was a game I was playing," he said. "What is the minimum amount of money I can spend each day to stay alive. You do some crazy things." Some of those crazy things included getting by with the barest of wardrobes. But because he had access to the building gym, he kept everything other than the clothes on his back and his computer there. "I only had maybe five to ten T-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a pair of shorts," he said, "so it all fit in one locker. [Plus] they had their own laundromat there, so I'd wash my clothes there." Evasion Simons could probably have crashed elsewhere, but he wanted to see how long he could make the AOL squatting work. Some friends knew what he was doing, and they thought it was funny. But no one helped him, other than a couple buddies who discussed strategies with him on how to evade security. "Honestly (though), I didn't think they were going to catch on," Simons said. "I had no indicators that they even cared about that...After the first month, I was like, 'This has worked so far, but this probably isn't sustainable,' so I made sure my friends were OK with" me eventually crashing on their couches. And then came that fateful morning with the 6 a.m. yelling. "One of the guys who manages the building came in at like 5 or 6 in the morning," Simons lamented, "and he scoured the entire place to find me. And he ripped me a new one. He was pissed that I was treating it like a dorm. Which was reasonable."[/QUOTE] [url]http://news.cnet.com/8301-32973_3-57440513-296/meet-the-tireless-entrepreneur-who-squatted-at-aol/[/url] The bolded part reminded me of Deus Ex or some other stealth game [highlight](User was banned for this post ("Rules: Articles posted here must not be more than a month old." - Orkel))[/highlight]
[quote]The first month, he spent just $30, mainly on the occasional trip to McDonald's or for "random food expenditures when I got sick of eating ramen and cereal.[/quote] what an existence
I remember hearing about this... [quote=CNET's page]May 24, 2012[/quote] Yep.
I didn't even know AOL was still a thing!
dude he spent 30 dollars in a month he must be loaded
So was he fired?
I'm more surprised that AOL still exists, honestly.
Sounds exactly like something George Constanza did in an episode of Seinfeld.
how can a human being survive being so boring
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