Isaiah Turner (entrepreneur)

Last updated
Isaiah Turner
Born (1998-08-07) August 7, 1998 (age 26)
Nationality American
Citizenship United States
Education St. Mary's Ryken High School [1]
Occupation(s) Entrepreneur, and engineer
Known forCo-founder of Monkey (2016)
Yo hacker (2014)
Website Official website

Isaiah Turner (born August 7, 1998) is an American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer. He is known as the co-founder of the mobile apps Monkey, [2] [3] Poparazzi, and Gas. [4]

Contents

In 2017, Turner was included in Crain's New York Business Magazine '20 Under 20' list as a breakout tech entrepreneur. [5] [6]

Early life

In 2014, Isaiah was selected by Apple as one of about 200 students in the world to receive an Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Student Scholarship. This included free attendance at Apple's San Francisco, California, event. [7]

On June 19, 2014, Isaiah hacked Yo after the app exploded in popularity and raised over $1.5 million in venture capital financing. [8] He sent the following push notification to Yo's users which caused the hashtag "#YoBeenHacked" to appear on Twitter's trending topics list. [9]

wow. many 1337. such bad security.

I hacked Yo. Use hashtag #YoBeenHacked to talk about it.

Or Arbel, developer of Yo, hired Isaiah Turner to fix the app's security flaws. At the time, Isaiah was 15 years old and still in school. [10]

Following his time at Yo, Isaiah was recruited by a lunch delivery service, MunchQuick. [11] The Washington, DC–based startup company raised $50,000 in seed funding and launched on June 30, 2014. [12] [13]

Career

Isaiah is the co-founder of Monkey. He started the company with his friend, Ben Pasternak. They created Monkey in response to their dissatisfaction with existing social media services. Monkey, which raised US$2,000,000, was acquired by rival Holla in December, 2017. [14]

Monkey is a video chat based app that has been described as something much like speed dating for friends. [15] Within its first year, Monkey had been used to make over 1 billion calls and received praise from Tim Cook. [16] At the time Monkey was acquired, it had been downloaded more than 3 million times and had over 300,000 monthly active users. [6] [17]

In August 2022, Isaiah co-started Gas, a social-media app where high-school students can anonymously vote in polls, which ranked No. 1 in the App Store. [18] [19]

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References

  1. ↑ "Student Awarded Scholarship to Apple Conference and Job with "Yo"". SoMD News. 2014-06-11. Retrieved 2017-04-17.
  2. ↑ "Monkey is a new social network just for teens". Mashable. 2017-01-19. Retrieved 2017-04-17.
  3. ↑ "MEET MONKEY'S TEEN-AGE FOUNDERS". The New Yorker. 2017-01-16. Retrieved 2017-04-17.
  4. ↑ "Gas: The App for Teens That Is Refreshingly Positive". Gizmodo. 2022-10-17. Retrieved 2022-10-18.
  5. ↑ "20 Under 20 - 2017 - Crain's New York Business". Crain's New York Business. 2017-11-27. Retrieved 2017-11-29.
  6. 1 2 "Isaiah Turner - 20 Under 20 - 2017 - Crain's New York Business". Crain's New York Business. 2017-11-27. Archived from the original on 2018-08-21. Retrieved 2017-11-28.
  7. ↑ "WWDC: Meet tomorrow's tech stars". USA Today. 2014-06-05. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  8. ↑ "An App That Just Says 'Yo' Has Raised $1.5 Million At A $5–10 Million Valuation". Business Insider. 2014-07-18. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  9. ↑ "$1 million 'Yo' app has serious security flaws, users say". CNBC. 2014-06-20. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  10. ↑ "Yo CEO hires hacker". Fox Business. 2015-05-24. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  11. ↑ "MunchQuick rushes into food delivery with revamped website". Technical.ly. 2014-10-20. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  12. ↑ "This New DC Startup Will Bring You Lunch in Under 20 Minutes". DC Inno. 2014-06-04. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  13. ↑ "Newly Launched MunchQuick Aims to Deliver Healthy Hot Meals in Under 20 Minutes". Tech.Co. 2014-07-10. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  14. ↑ "Aussie whiz-kid Ben Pasternak eyes next project after selling video chat app Monkey to rival". The Sydney Morning Herald. 2018-01-02. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
  15. ↑ "What Is The Monkey App? Connecting Teens To Strangers Via Video Chat". International Business Times. 2017-04-14. Retrieved 2017-04-16.
  16. ↑ "Sydney high school dropout sitting on million-dollar empire". 9Stories. 2017-04-16. Retrieved 2017-04-17.
  17. ↑ "This popular teen app is quickly turning into Chatroulette 2.0, complete with all its issues". CNBC. 2017-08-03. Retrieved 2018-01-24.
  18. ↑ "The co-founder of social-media app Gas tells Elon Musk to hire him as Twitter's product chief". Business Insider. 2022-10-29. Retrieved 2022-11-03.
  19. ↑ "Gas: The App for Teens That Is Refreshingly Positive". Gizmodo. 2022-11-03. Retrieved 2022-10-17.
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