When Ben Lamm was in middle school, his mother told him to mow the lawn while she ran some errands. When she got home, she found a neighborhood kid finishing the weed. When she found Ben playing video games, he said, "I gave him part of my allowance, so we all took over." »
No one could dispute his affairs. As a high school student in 1999, Lamm taught himself Macromedia Flash before he became Adobe and sold his first website for $20,000. During his freshman year at Baylor University, when he had a double major in accounting and finance, he told one of his professors that they were going to be business partners. Regardless, the latter did not know the name of his student. Less than two years later, the professor was working for Lamm's first startup.
Lamm's mind is wired differently than most. Even her personality is atypical of the majority of successful serial entrepreneurs, a hybrid combination of type A and type B – competitive, energetic and ambitious, but naturally social, authentic, fast-forward button, talkative and cold to the point. to show up for business meetings with potential investors wearing a T-shirt and flip-flops, not to mention long hair and a scruffy beard.
“Work and life are complicated enough without this layer extra to try to be who you're not,” Lamm says.
© JOHN DAVIDSON
For every successful entrepreneur, there are failed projects. It's the cost of playing the game. So far, however, Lamm has proven to be an exception. Each of his previous four startups became extremely successful businesses before selling out at high profit margins.
First there was Simply Interactive, an e-learning software company started in college by Lamm. Then there was Chaotic Moon, an Austin-based creative studio that had over 200 employees and $50 million in annual revenue before it was acquired by Accenture. Next was Team Chaos, a game development company that was sold to Zynga, followed by Conversable, which partnered with Whole Foods and Pizza Hut using automated software to interact with customers through social media.
Work and life are complicated enough without that extra layer of trying to be who you are not.
"I know a lot of people like to say they're product people, but I'm more of a brand guy," Lamm says. “A lot of startups won't spend the time on branding. They are obsessed with income. You want the story to resonate. We shouldn't need a mission statement with five points. True to form, for his latest, and arguably most ambitious venture, Lamm spent six months bringing Hypergiant to market before launching in February 2018. If he's successful, there's really no no way to underestimate the ramifications. Simplified to the millionth exponent, the goal is the internet and the streaming of data in space, which is all the more relevant given that not only NASA plans to return to the Moon, but private visionaries like Amazon's Jeff Bezos are also investing in the future of space. Travel. Currently, it takes eight minutes to send a signal to Mars. The goal is eight seconds.
"We wouldn't be advancing society if we weren't a curious species," Lamm says. “We are destined to go to the stars. I fundamentally believe that we will be an interplanetary species. And certainly in our lifetime, permanent residents on the Moon and on Mars. »
COURTESY OF HYPERGIANT
Hypergiant has created nearly 150 jobs in its first 14 months and has already added three subsidiaries to focus on different tasks, including Space Age Solutions, which develops custom AI solutions, and Applied Sciences, which develops AI products. 'AIs based on the needs of trends.
Hypergiant probably wouldn't have been created without the AI revolution, as Lamm thought about the business conceptually when more and more Conversable customers asked him to help meet their AI demands. If Hypergiant succeeds in space, it will be heavily dependent on AI capabilities.
“We believe AI is going to be as transformative if not more so than the internet,” says Lamm. “And look what the internet has done for the world. ”
After successfully starting and selling four startups, the stakes are high this time for Lamm. Unlike previous forays, Hypergiant is for the long haul.
"Every business I've built so far, I've been like, 'Here's the market opportunity, here's something I'm interested in. a lot, this is how we build the brand to own the category, this is how we adapt services and products to earn this, this is the culture to do it, “Said Lamm
“Hypergiant is a different beast. It is not my intention to sell it. This is my legacy. If we're right, it's a trillion dollar business. I consider this the rest of my life. "
