Ben Pasternak isn't your average Australian teenager. At 15, he has created an iPhone game that rose up the App Store charts at an incredible rate. In the first six weeks after its October launch, Impossible Rush had been downloaded 500,000 times. It overtook Vine, Google and Twitter as it quickly clocked up downloads with its addictive nature.
Pasternak, from Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, created the app with another teen in Chicago, Austin Valleskey, while he was bored at school. Now, the whiz kid is in the United States being sussed out by some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Google, Facebook and Yahoo — where he hopes to secure an internship.
Facebook's internship department has invited Pasternak on a tour of the company's headquarters in California, while Google's Vice President of Search, Yossi Matais, asked him to the search giant's campus, after his son became aware of Pasternak's work.
The teen entrepreneur is keeping his cards close to his chest on what this means for his future. "We shall see," the cool-headed Pasternak says to Mashable.
Pasternak travelled to Silicon Valley with his family for a Google and MIT Launch sponsored event, Hack Generation Y, this weekend. It invites applications from high school students around the world, with 450 young entrepreneurs accepted, who go on to create a product in 36 hours. Pasternak was one of just 20 students to be invited from outside the U.S., among the others are a 17-year-old Lebanese CEO who is raising money for his startup and a 17-year-old Israeli CEO who recently raised $300,000 for his projects.
The lead organiser of the hackathon and son of Yossi, Michael Matias, told Mashable Pasternak stood out from the crowd during the application process especially with the work he has completed on his new social network aggregator app, One.
"[Pasternak is] a young entrepreneur and clearly ambitious, he has shown the world that age is just a number. His work with the app One, and the previous iPhone app was extremely impressive and if we were to guess — we would never imagine it was run by a 15 year old!" Matias said.
Pasternak isn't in this for the money. He sold Impossible Rush, which at his last count had 750,000 downloads, to his friend in New York Carlos Fajardo, for $US200. Fajardo marketed the app and helped it skyrocket to the top of the charts.
"My biggest motivation is knowing that my apps make people's lives just a little bit easier and simple. There is no better feeling than seeing people using your creations," Pasternak said from his hotel room in San Francisco.
Via Mashable
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