Stay hungry, stay foolish
by Tony Bruess, who was accepted to Stanford University
Prompt: Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. (650 word limit.)
January 9th, 2007 was not your average Tuesday. At 11 a.m. CST, Steve Jobs was scheduled to deliver his highly anticipated MacWorld keynote. Like other Apple fanatics, I anticipated something huge and knew I couldn’t miss watching Jobs unveil Apple’s next genius innovation. Late Monday night, my mom finally relented; she would allow me to skip school the next day. In doing so, she acknowledged something that to this day everyone in my life knows about me. The innovative spirit of Apple has become a profound part of who I am and how I see myself: as an intrepid innovator, a young entrepreneur/business owner, and someone who, from the second I could pick up a mouse, has been obsessed with everything techy.
Cords, gadgets and screens have been my signature since infancy. According to my baby book, my first real word was “hose.” I thought those long green things in people’s yards were outdoor electrical cords. At age six I wanted only one thing from Santa: an overhead projector. “He” found one on eBay. At age eight I purchased (with my own savings) and installed (by myself) a dazzling holiday light display that not only lit up the entire neighborhood but our electrical bill as well. This same year I launched my first successful business: Tony’s Tech Help. Two years later and after saving many months’ earnings, I invested in my first laptop. I was unaware at the time how that purchase would significantly kindle my computer science curiosity.
My new best friend was that new MacBook Pro. I spent hours learning about it while my parents spent hours screaming: “Too much screen time!” At age 11, I was authoring hacky programs and writing bits of code. At age 12, I rented my first server and became fluent in multiple programming languages. In 8th grade, I didn’t just go to school; I spent time each day monitoring my servers and maintaining more than a dozen websites for local businesses and nonprofits. At age 15, I had the idea that would become my next business.
Enter Minecraft, the defining game of my generation. It was Fall 2012 and I started dabbling in coding Minecraft server “plug-ins.” It didn’t take long until buzz about my work grew and I became one of the recognized experts in the global server community. Then came an idea: develop team combat matches organized by server plug-ins on unique Minecraft maps, a concept no one else had yet brought to market. What came next was a prototype, and then growth: from a dozen players on my development server to more than a hundred players on my first 24/7 server. People loved what I had to offer! Just a few months later my infrastructure built on Java, Ruby, MongoDB, and Nginx was exploding with new subscribers and became “The Overcast Network.” By 2013 I was seeing nearly 100,000 unique users and more than 1,000,000 page views per week. I also saw competing servers popping up attempting to mimic my concept. Watching my idea become a wildly successful business was an incredible feeling. In the last 10 months, unique users and page views per week have doubled. I’m also about to present at the international Minecraft convention, Minecon, on the panel “Growing Server Communities.”
While designing the gameplay, website, and overall user experience of Overcast, there is something that not only keeps me inspired, but keeps the frequent feeling of chaos from becoming overwhelming: Apple and Steve Jobs’ legacy. Their everlasting inspiration teaches me time and again about innovation through design, simplicity and the value of risk-taking. As I look to what’s next in both my computer science education and in my life as an entrepreneur, I will, as Jobs’ himself urged in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
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