Working at Google is a dream for most of the software engineers. And landing a job at Google just after high school is more like fantasy.
This is a story of one such kid who got a job offer from Google before entering the college at the age of 18. Larry Gadea built a plug-in for Google Desktop Search which would allow the users to find and index files in their computers that Google Desktop Search couldn’t. Larry’s plug-in made the search feature a lot more useful, and it became popular within no time. As Google did not allowed plug-ins at that time, Larry had to hack into their system.
Google immediately scouted for young Larry and offered him a job. After doing internship at Google’s Moutain View Office for three months, he then worked part time through his four years of college in Google Canada.
After college Larry wanted to try something new. He worked with Twitter for three years as a back end engineer. At that time Twitter used to crash a lot, so he created a data center optimization technique and named it “Murder” ( quite an irony) to reduce the ‘Fail Whales’, the frequent crashes Twitter encountered.
Soon Gadea got bored and he wanted to start his own company. He got the idea of a start-up a year later. As he talks to Business Insider
“It was weird that Google and Apple had you type in your information in a computer at the front desk, but smaller companies didn’t have that technology. Either the receptionist would leave the desk and find the person, or there’d be no one at all.”
So Gadea built a software for such applications, called “Envoy”, to check-in people at offices and keep track of visitors.
It would basically allow visitors to sign-in through an iPad app, and print out a name tag with their photos on it. Its latest app can send push notifications to the iPhone and even show the person’s photo on the Apple Watch.
Envoy soon became the most sought after software, signing up over a whopping 1,000 offices. It boasts a client list like Airbnb, Pandora, GoPro, and Tesla.
On Tuesday, Envoy announced a $15 million Series A investment by Andreessen Horowitz, with its general partner Chris Dixon. In November 2014, Envoy has raised $1.5 million from Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Quora’s Adam D’Angelo, and Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman.
Dixon told the Business Insider
If you go around Silicon Valley today, almost every startup you go to has Envoy at the front desk. It’s sort of become a hit viral app. Larry’s a prodigy. He’s just a classic scrappy, super brilliant Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
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