Hide My Ass earns a former mischievous secondary school boy £40 million

It is not always that you should be mad at your kid or small sibling for being the bad ass in school – you never know – s/he might just come up with a Hide My Ass security pass that finally makes him worth just over six billion Kenya shillings got from a four hours worth of work.

Bad ass is exactly what Mark Zuckerburg was, and also what Jack Cator was in 2005, and by that time he was only sixteen. His secondary school, just like any other secondary, high, or tertiary school, or like any other government and private work place, had put restrictions on Internet access. Websites containing fun content like movies, music, games and pictures of beautiful assets were blocked. As a high school kid, he could only access sites necessary for doing his homework – and that’s very boring.

Hide My Ass
HMA office – Image courtesy of BBC

With the little programming knowledge he had gathered, he found away to circumvent the security wall the secondary school had set – “he used a website which disguises a computer’s digital fingerprint, by routing it through a remote server, typically located abroad, allowing a user to surf the internet privately and anonymously” – he used Virtual Private Networks to watch his favorite music and videos – and played some cool games.

But there were problems using the available Virtual Private Networks (VPN) – they were of poor quality, difficult to use and came with too many displeasing ads, and so he decided to create his own VPN – and he did so just in an afternoon while comfortably seated on his parent’s sofa – and named it Hide My Ass (HMA) VPN.

After testing his HMA, he decided to promote it online from where he realized he could make some money via the affiliate marketing model – where he got commission for referrals to online stores and other e-commerce platforms – similar to how guys earn from Google Ads. “Within a month HMA had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and revenues of £15,000 per annum” writes BBC. About ten years down the line, the customer base had increased to over two million globally helping him to generate a revenue of over £11 million.

That revenue caught the interest of the giant security firm, AVG. At the age of 26, Mr. Cator has sold his Hide My Ass business to AVG for 40 million British Pounds, a figure that equals roughly 6.03 billion Kenya shillings – thanks to being a bad ass in high school.

It is stories like those that make me wish the laptop to class one kids project wasn’t political. You never know, probably one of them could have turned out to be a bad ass. Please dear reader, provide the little kids with laptops, smartphones and video games.

Login

Welcome! Login in to your account

Remember me Lost your password?

Lost Password