Startups Open Sourced by Jared Tame

Author:Jared Tame [Tame, Jared]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-05-01T04:00:00+00:00

Sam Odio, Divvyshot

Tags: acquired (Facebook), Y Combinator, anti-school, school worker, programmer, iterate slowly, design-focused

Overview: Divvyshot was created to make group photo sharing easy. After going through Y Combinator in 2009, Divvyshot was acquired by Facebook in April 2010. Just before it was acquired, Divvyshot had 40,000 active and loyal users.

How did you get started with entrepreneurship? Can you recall your earliest experience?

It was definitely my brother Daniel who is 9 years older than me. He was into entrepreneurship—he sold candy bars on the bus ride to school and was always doing stuff like that. I would always emulate him growing up. We lived around DC and so July 4th was a big deal. Everybody was going to Washington DC to see the fireworks, and he would sell sodas to the crowds and make a couple of hundred dollars over the course of the night which when you’re 12 years old is an insane amount of money. Of course after he went to college I started doing the same thing.

I started building computers when I was 13 years old, and I was always interested in hardware. My brother saw that and when I was 17 he sat me down and said “Sam, I’m going to show you how to incorporate a business.” And so in an afternoon we incorporated my first business. I got into computer repair and I just spent the next year passing out fliers while I was in high school, trying to convince people to pay me 60 bucks an hour just to fix their computers, which for me was good money. I saw the Geek Squad charging $70 and I thought, “I can definitely charge less and deliver a better service.”

What was college like?

I actually got deferred and then rejected from every college I applied to, so I ended up going to this school called Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia—like the game, Farmville. It was crazy. There aren’t very many computers there, so I found somebody to take over the business in Northern Virginia, and then I started advertising online. This was in 2003: I would advertise through Google Adwords for the DC Metro area and then I realized “Hey, I could do this nationally.”

I started advertising nationally and whenever I got a new job in a new major city, I would find a computer technician using Craigslist. Then I’d start targeting that city. In this way I grew city by city and expanded the presence of this computer repair company; eventually we were fixing computers in a dozen cities. That was my first year of college and it was pretty rough for me getting rejected from every school I applied to. It was a really tough experience.

I ended up at Longwood deciding that I still wanted to go to the University of Virginia. In high school, when I learned I had gotten deferred, I decided, “I’m going to do everything I can to get into UVA.” So I made a website called “chance-for-odio.com” which basically said

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