I raised $1 million for my tech startup by taking Zoom meetings in my high-school bathroom

Eric Zhu, now 17, cofounded Aviato. He dropped out of high school and moved to San Francisco to run the startup full-time after raising $2.3 million.

• Eric Zhu raised $1 million for Aviato from his high school bathroom aged 15 for his startup Aviato.
• Aviato is a data analysis platform for private markets and has raised $2.3 million to date.
• Zhu leveraged social media popularity and booked cold meetings with potential investors. 

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Eric Zhu, now 17 years old. He cofounded the startup Aviato and raised $1 million while still at high school aged 15. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his identity and the funds raised.

I started raising money from my high school bathroom for a startup I cofounded at the age of 14 called Aviato, a data analysis platform for private markets, and launched an investment fund.

My journey as an entrepreneur started during the pandemic after I joined a community on Discord called "Gen Z Mafia."

I was lucky to meet some really smart people at the right time and thought "How can I be like them?" I started networking and worked with a few startups in 2021 to help build landing pages for their websites.

I then joined Stanford's Online High School community and met some impressive people. At the age of 14, I cofounded a nonprofit that taught kids to code for free, and I also learned to code myself in the process.

In 2021, I started raising money from my high school bathroom in Carmel, Indiana for a startup I cofounded called Aviato, and I also launched an investment fund called Bachmanity Capital.

Aviato is like a Bloomberg terminal for private markets, and we provide insights such as the name of a top engineer at an organization, and how many shares an employee has.

Bathroom meetings

When it came to raising money, I didn't know many people in San Francisco. But I realized that the investors I saw on X had usernames that correlated to their Calendly links, a platform that helps schedule meetings. So I wrote a scraper tool that would pull their usernames and find their Calendly link, and I'd use that to book meetings with many different people.

I would attend those cold Zoom meetings from my high school bathroom and pitch to investors. I even bought a green screen and ring light for serious meetings. A lot of people were like "fuck you," but some ended up working out.

I got my first check of $50,000 from Tom Preston-Werner, a cofounder of GitHub. When I got that check, I was like, "holy shit, they're actually giving me money."

I would buy hall passes from other students to get out of class. At one point, I was spending about five hours a day in the bathroom taking meetings. But I ended up getting banned from going to the bathroom without an escort.

Trial and error

But it was worth it, as I raised $1 million in 2022. We've raised a total of $2.3 million and we're about to launch Aviato. Now, we're a team of nine people.

I learned to navigate meetings with potential investors through trial and error. The first few calls were absolutely horrible, but they improved over time. I figured a lot of it out along the way.

My age could be seen as both a negative and a positive factor. Some of the negative feedback was that I was still in school and not working on the startup full-time, so I'd often get asked why they should bet on me.

On the flip side, my willingness to take a risk and hold meetings in my high school bathroom showed that I'm willing to go out of my way to build a company, so I think that was a big factor in winning over some investors.

Going viral

I took a photo of myself taking a meeting in the bathroom and posted it on X, which ended up blowing up and going viral. I learned there are three things that go viral: controversial, funny, and out-of-context.

So we built our startup story around that and shared it through meme accounts, which can be a powerful form way to reach a wide audience. Going viral also helped me to meet new people.

I haven't graduated from high school yet and I started taking online classes instead a few months ago after I got suspended for taking meetings in the bathroom.

I then moved to San Francisco to work on building the company full-time. My parents are pretty chill about it, but for the first two months, they thought it was a little surprising for me to take a risk like this.

I've learned a ton and experienced some highs and lows. It's opened up my world, but it hasn't come without difficulty.

There are a lot of times when it's like, "I don't know what to do," but I've figured it out along the way. Surrounding myself with experienced people like my cofounders and investors has been really helpful.

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