Twickenham coding genius swapping GCSEs for Silicon Valley
As a toddler, Toby Brown first began tinkering with padlocks. Then he started kitting his house out with alarms made out of bits of paper and wires. By the time he was in primary school, he had coded timetable games and was selling them back to his teachers in Twickenham, west London.The schoolboy later joined Hack Club, a global hackers' community for teenagers, where he became their youngest employee at age 13.Now at 16, Toby has secured a $1m deal with Silicon Valley investors for an AI platform he has built, Beem.
Toby has postponed taking his GCSEs and instead is jetting off to build up his business in sunny California.He said: "This amount of money is going to be so helpful. I actually got the phone call on my birthday, so it was a great birthday gift."My friends were quite shocked by it. I made the mistake of not telling them early enough, and it got to the last week of school, and the news came out, and suddenly everyone was like, 'Ah, Toby, can I have a tenner?'"It was such a massive part of life. I'd wake up early in the morning to work on it, and I'd come home from school and start coding, it was all I was doing, all I was working on, and it was hard sometimes not being able to tell everyone what I was up to."
As for what Beem actually does, Toby explains: "It's essentially a computer that brings files to you; it can bring your calendar to you, and it's scaleable to do anything, really."An example I really like is if you imagine you're going on holiday and you're going with your family, you've booked an Airbnb and it [Beem] realises you've not booked your flights yet. Beem knows you; it knows your price, and it knows what airline you like to fly with."For Toby's mother Claire, it is a mystery where he got his coding talent from."We don't have a background in coding or computing. I work for the NHS; my husband is in marketing, and it's not something we know much about," she said.
"It was quite a shock for us, quite surprising," added Claire."But he did it all by himself - from building his first computer to finding Hack Club, which was where he really found his people and community."Toby's mentor and founder of Hack Club, Zach Latta, who is based in Vermont, in the US, said he knew Toby was special straight away."From the first day you met Toby, you knew that this was going to happen."Hack Club is a place where there are hundreds of teenagers around the world who are working together on these alternate paths, and you could just tell that Toby was going to take this step."I'd say it wasn't a surprise from me when I heard that he'd raised $1million, obviously that was going to happen," Mr Latta explained."It's so exciting to see so many incredible young people joining Hack Club from London and the UK right now, there's a big growing community there."
'World domination'
"It's such an exciting opportunity," Toby added. "I think we've got an opportunity to really change things, change how we use computers, and I couldn't turn that down."Toby said after his trip to California, he hoped to return to London and continue his schooling.But asked whether Beem was going to take over the world, Toby chuckles: "World domination, but not the evil kind!"
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