I met the three cofounders for lunch on Friday in the inner sanctum of Jeff Klein’s San Vicente, the members-only club in the West Village. (The club is generally restricted to guests 18 and older, but seems to have made an exception for the now 17-year-old cofounder and chief technology officer John Kessler.)
Koh, the 21-year-old president of the company, is the most brash and outspoken member of the trio. He compares starting a business to “gladiatorial combat” and genuinely believes that if someone were to say he had to join the NBA in order to save his mother’s life, “I would be on the fucking All-Star team next year.”
Cam Fink, 20, with an elusive accent acquired in the 17 different cities where he spent his childhood, is Koh’s more reserved and erudite counterpart. He reminisces about his teenage years, when he had time to read 100 books a year; fluently cites philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre; and even name-drops several deep cuts from the Vanity Fair archive, like Brian McNally’s 2008 “Letter From Saigon” and Bethany McLean’s 2009 column on imploding hedge funds.
Lest you think they’re new to this whole entrepreneurship thing, they’ll tell you they’ve been at it for years. When Kessler was eight, his father asked him to clean the yard for $5 per hour. He found another kid to do the work for three bucks and kept the margin. Fink found a way to counterfeit his teacher Mr. Darcy’s “Darcy Dollars,” which were supposed to be earned as extra credit and redeemed for classroom perks, and sell them to classmates. As a kid, Koh bought a “really nice basketball” and charged other kids to use it on the playground.
Fink and Koh met in their freshman year of high school, bonding over hacking projects and boredom with their schoolwork. During a gap year before college (that is, the two weeks Koh spent at Harvard and the one night Fink spent at Dartmouth before dropping out), they came up with the idea for Aaru and quickly raised $7.5 million. They brought Kessler on as a cofounder after meeting him on Zoom. Fink and Koh often refer to him as the smartest person they’ve ever met.
The young savant mostly kept to himself at lunch, interjecting only occasionally to sprinkle the conversation with facts and figures, like the Korean birth rate, the population of China, or the deal size of the recent Blue Bottle Coffee acquisition. Just when I started to forget I was talking to a teenager, he would blurt out something like, “Once, I only ate chicken wings for a week straight!”
Today, the trio manages 27 employees out of a six-story former architect’s office in Tribeca. The space, which features a towering Cubist mural and a shelf of ancient artifacts, is littered with empty cans of Celsius (mostly Kessler’s, I am told), snacks from Meadow Lane, and carpet samples in rich ’70s hues. They’re picking out designs for the artist’s loft in SoHo that they are relocating to next month to accommodate their growing staff, which they expect to more than double this year.
