For Paul Kafasis, honesty isn't always the best policy. As a 16-year-old aspiring entrepreneur and computer programmer, the Tufts senior -- now 21 and the co-founder and CEO of a successful company called Rogue Amoeba that sells $1,200 of audio software daily -- did some age-related fact fudging.
"Back when I first started writing software reviews, I hadn't met any of the people I was working with, and nobody had any idea how old I was," said Princeton, N.J.-bred Kafasis. "I had to go to high school. So to explain my absence from 8 am to 4 pm, I actually told them that I was a history teacher."
Kafasis' white lie paid off. If he hadn't been reviewing software while still in high school, Kafasis might not have come across StripAmp, a MP3 controller that was then being offered for free by its programmer -- one of Kafasis' future Rogue Amoeba business partners, Alex Lagutin, 31.
"I wrote to [Lagutin] that he should try to sell [StripAmp]," Kafasis said. After Lagutin, who lives in Eastern Russia, told him that he couldn't set up the company there, Kafasis suggested that he would set it up and split the profits. The two men went on to make several hundred dollars through StripAmp sales. "It didn't sell that well, but when you're 15, it's a decent amount of money," Kafasis said.
Lagutin and Kafasis then worked for a larger company, @Soft, through which they met Rogue Amoeba's third co-founder, Quentin Carnicelli, 21. The three formed one short-lived company, SubAmp, before founding Rogue Amoeba around a product called Audio Hijack (see box) in Sept., 2002 -- right at the beginning of Kafasis' sophomore year at Tufts. "We've been doing it ever since," he said.
For Kafasis, "doing it" has meant juggling business (on which he spends between two and ten hours each day) and schoolwork -- he's a planning to graduate in three-years as a computer engineering major in order to speed up his launch into full-time business. Kafasis also works for Tufts Online, "as their Mac guy," and as a systems administrator for a Mac lab at Halligan Hall.
"I schedule things around each other," Kafasis said. "The most amount of work I have to do is when we do a product release or product update, so I don't schedule those for when I have finals or a huge test."
"At the end of last year, I had some meetings that I had to make down in Maryland at the same time as finals, so I actually had to reschedule [my finals]," he said. "But my teachers are pretty understanding. Once I explained to them what was going on, they realized it's a good opportunity and made allowances."
Though he's "had fun" at Tufts and thinks that "in terms of programming and computer and systems administration, a college degree absolutely helps you," Kafasis feels that a degree is not essential. "Some stuff is so new that colleges aren't teaching it -- they're behind the times," he said. "I know at least a couple of people who work in systems administration at EECS that haven't graduated from college, and you can't tell."
The way things are going for Rogue Amoeba right now, any founders' leaving is unlikely. "We're pretty well-known at this point, so there's a sort of barrier to entry for competitors because people associate our name with doing this," Kafasis said. "People either know about us, or they look up how to record [internet radio] and find us. We have the first-to-market advantage on this, and we've grown a lot since then, so we have the advertising capital if we need to be able to sort of advertise someone out of profitability or existence."
Rogue Amoeba has been written up in Macworld, BusinessWeek, and Mix Magazine, and its products have garnered national acclaim. "We had a booth set up at the [2004] Macworld Expo in San Francisco, a huge convention - 50,000 or 100,000 people come to it -- and we won the Best of Show award, which they give to only about three or four different products out of 200 or 300 different vendors," Kafasis said. "It was really cool and really good for sales."
Thanks in part to Rogue Amoeba's financial success, Kafasis is thoroughly enjoying himself: he bought a motorcycle in Boston a year ago that he keeps at home in New Jersey, and he has an '88 BMW 325 convertible at Tufts. "During the winter, there's maybe two or three days when it gets above 50 degrees, so I drop my top then and drive around, and people think I'm nuts," he said. While doing so, he added, "I play CDs that I've recorded [through Audio Hijack] ... it's funny: I can't play music and I have no real ear for music, but I like listening to it, and that's sort of been the focus of all this -- being surrounded by music for the last five years."
Another of Kafasis' interests is law: before Rogue Amoeba "became feasible as a full-time thing," he planned on going to law school to study intellectual property law. Though those plans have been shelved indefinitely -- "I can wait 10 years -- I'm having fun and I like what I'm doing," Kafasis said -- he has had the chance to enter the legal realm from another perspective.
"The biggest thing people say when they see [Rogue Amoeba's products] is, 'Oh, you should download this before it gets shut down,'" Kafasis said. "But we've been around for 18 months now -- the RIAA purchased a copy of Audio Hijack Pro to test it out, and we haven't heard back from them since."
So why did the RIAA attack programs like Napster but leave Audio Hijack alone? According to Kafasis, Audio Hijack, unlike Napster, isn't useful in terms of stealing music. "If you're listening to an online radio station, you don't know what's coming up next, so you can't do anything too easily with that. And online streams are generally a lot lower quality than the downloads you would get. So the legal aspects of it are pretty solid."
Thanks to a 1984 Supreme Court case that dealt with the legality of VCRs, timeshifting -- recording something that's on now and then watching it later -- is perfectly legal. "That's sort of how this works: it's a VCR for internet radio," Kafasis said of Audio Hijack.
What Kafasis wants is the chance to "keep doing this as long as I want to": his plans for himself are intertwined with his plans for Rogue Amoeba. "Next year I plan on doing this full time," he said. "I have no idea where I'll be living, but all I need is an internet connection and my computers - I can do it from just about anywhere."
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