Mark Bao - 18-year-old creator of Threewords.me

When Marc Bao was in fifth grade, he wrote a homework management application and sold it on floppy disks to his classmates. Later he started playing with PHP and web design, and in his freshman year he created Debateware, a program for discussion clubs in schools and colleges.

Just a month ago, Bao created the site Threewords.me . It is simple, allowing users to describe their friends on the site or on Twitter in three words. After just three weeks, the site reached a quarter of a million users, 5 million visits, 4.3 million words and 17 million page views.

He started the site as a side project for experts with two ideas. The first is how to get customers through viral marketing, and the second is research on how people write honest opinions about themselves.
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When the project became big, he decided to sell it, as he distracted him from other major startups. Bao also admits that he works much better with startups that have a clear monetization strategy, and not with those who earn free services.



40-50 people wanted to buy Threewords, and it was finally sold to Kevin Ham, an Internet entrepreneur who owns 300 million domain names (god.com, satan.com). Bao cannot give the exact amount of the transaction, but says that it is pleasant both to him and his parents.

What did Bao find out about Threewords users?

“Any user of a social network is a little narcissist,” he says laughing. “This is one of the driving reasons why the site was a success.”

An 18-year-old entrepreneur grew up in Welsey, Massachusetts. The only child in the family whose parents are working on cancer research, moved with the family from China to the states when Bao was 4 years old.
He is now a freshman at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and when he is not working on startups, he plays games, such as Call Of Duty: Black Ops. “I'm trying to reduce my insignificant time,” he explains.

He decided to stay away from the girls at the moment, due to the lack of so much time for them. But if he moves to New York, “something can change,” he says laughing. (Several businessmen from New York are trying to lure him away from college).
His next project, codenamed "City of Whiskey", the details of which were not disclosed, aims to revive the online reservation of places in restaurants. But his most ambitious project, called Avecora, is a cloud network.

To learn more about Avecora and its creator, see the interview, shot a few days ago, in Union Square in New York: