| So he gave away his battered sofa, chairs and a bed, leaving his one-bedroom apartment in Shadyside with that gaping student-housing look. His spartan surroundings wouldn't be unusual if he were just another 20-something kid just out of college. But Kumar is an Internet multimillionaire at the enviable and ridiculous age of 25. He struck it rich by selling his Oakland company, SneakerLabs Inc. But his apartment hasn't kept pace. The blue futon, lonely in his living room, is enough permanence for him. "You never know when you have to move," he says matter-of-factly. "I would rather keep it simple." Never mind that Kumar could buy entire moving and furniture companies. Never mind that most people worth many millions wouldn't be living in a half-empty $700-a-month apartment. Never mind that other millionaires would be out buying a mansion and fine leather couches and artwork from an exclusive Manhattan gallery. Kumar's idea of wall decorations is $10 whiteboards from Home Depot, where he scribbles down his thoughts, which come to him when less driven people are sleeping or watching TV. Kumar seems oblivious to his fortune at a time when so many Americans are obsessed about instant wealth. Millionaire-itis is the obsession of our times. We fixate on the TV show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and the most cunning "Survivor." Everywhere you look, there is another story about dot.com riches or stock-market wealth. It's a new national pastime, fantasizing about becoming suddenly rich and telling your boss you're outta here. "There are a lot more wealthy people," says Stephen Goldbart, a clinical psychologist who co-founded the Money, Meaning and Choices Institute in San Francisco. "It makes everybody else working regular jobs feel left out." And nothing elicits millionaire-envy among working stiffs than those stories about young dot.com millionaires who made their wealth through Internet savvy. In Silicon Valley, super-rich, super-young techies are no longer a novelty. But in Pittsburgh -- where it is challenging enough to find a young person, let alone a young millionaire, let alone a young Internet millionaire who is willing to be interviewed -- Manu Kumar is part of a select society. The soft-spoken Kumar doesn't mind talking about being an entrepreneur. How he sold musical doorbells in his native New Delhi, India, when he was 14 and began SneakerLabs -- which lets business people facilitate meetings online -- on a student visa while at Carnegie Mellon University. Or how it was hard for him to rent a car as a 24-year-old CEO because of age restrictions.
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Manu Kumar lives in a modest apartment in Shadyside and is a computer whiz who's not very good at video games. And oh yeah - he's a multimillionare, too. (Matt Freed, Post-Gazette) |
But Kumar winces when you bring up the distasteful subject of money. His millions are just sitting there in the stock of E.piphany, the company that bought another company that bought SneakerLabs of Oakland in March. SneakerLabs is now part of E.piphany, and he still runs the 17-person Pittsburgh office. Kumar doesn't fixate on his net worth, which he won't divulge. He checks the price of E.piphany stock only once a day. "I hate the term 'Internet millionaires,' " Kumar says, scrunching up his forehead, a tiny cloud passing over his normally placid disposition. "It brings up the wrong connotation." "It really focuses on the wrong thing, on the money aspect. Money is points for entrepreneurs, the currency of entrepreneurship."
  
As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, Kumar willed himself into Professor Jack Thorne's entrepreneurship class. Kumar, a software engineering student, wasn't bothered by the fact that this popular class was normally reserved for students of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration. "I am just going to show up, and you have to throw me out,"' Kumar politely told Thorne. A soft-spoken bulldog, as always. Finally, Thorne relented and let him stay. "He made a nuisance of himself," Thorne says fondly of the young man who became a star pupil. "It was easier to admit him than refuse him. But he did it in a nice way." With dark intense eyes softened by long lashes and an easy laugh, Kumar could pass for someone in his 30s. He also has a precocious calm. "He is aggressive, but you never see it coming," says Quintin Lovicks, a Web site designer for E.piphany, explaining Kumar's talent for negotiating. "He has that soft voice. You find yourself agreeing. In the end, you say, 'He just won that one.' " It was almost as though Kumar came out of the womb with this incredible drive, ignoring his parents' pleas not to push himself so hard and have some fun. By age 7, he would memorize entire textbooks, down to the commas and words on a particular page. His mother, Veena, would read to him, and if she deviated from the exact wording, he would tell Mommy that she left a word out. "He was always a mini-adult," says Veena, who corresponds daily with her son via electronic messages on the computer. His parents own a successful nuts and bolts company. "We were not stinking rich but perfectly well off," Manu says. The younger of two children, Kumar always knew he would start his own company, too. By 17, he had designed a solar car -- he still hopes to build it someday -- and a software security system he sold for a few hundred dollars. There was no stigma for being super-brainy in India, no taunts of "nerd" or "computer geek." For this, he is grateful he went to private high school in India. But for college, he wanted a technologically elite U.S. school, and chose Carnegie Mellon. While a grad student in the December of 1996, he started SneakerLabs, named for his computer ID. The 21-year-old scrounged up the $5,000 startup costs from teaching and consulting jobs. At first, he worked out of his apartment, developing software that lets people set up chat rooms on their Web sites more easily. He sold that software for under $100,000. In March of 1988, he moved on to software that would let far-flung conference attendees write on a virtual white board or collaborate on a slide presentation. SneakerLabs also developed an instant messaging system that lets retailers communicate with their customers. When Kumar rounded up individual investors in November of 1988, it helped that he looked as if he were 30 instead of a pup of just 23. His biggest worry the first two years was getting a work visa. The fact that Kumar paid himself a meager CEO salary of less than $20,000 didn't help. He needed to show that he was making at least $60,000 to get a work visa. When Kumar asked for the raise, he apologized to the board and promised to repay the company afterward. "He was still grossly underpaid. He's cheap -- but in the good sense of the word," says former SneakerLabs board member Frank Demmler, who says Manu is not motivated by money or ego, but by a "missionary zeal." Like Kumar himself, the corporate culture he established at SneakerLabs was both manic (24/7, no set vacations) and relaxed ("Aloha Fridays" dress code). Video games of Quake helped blow off the tension of 16-hour days in the Baum Boulevard office. No one worked harder than Kumar. In March, the hard work paid off when Octane, a San Mateo, Calif. software company, bought SneakerLabs. Soon after, E.piphany, also of San Mateo, bought Octane. So SneakerLabs became part of E.piphany. His colleagues congratulated Kumar after reading in the newspaper that his net worth was about $50 million. With the pounding of NASDAQ, the price of E.piphany stock has dropped, and Kumar's worth has fluctuated in the estimated $16 million to $20 million range this September. Even so, not exactly shabby.
  
Kumar doesn't appear to be suffering from "sudden wealth syndrome," the name for the malady afflicting some of the new millionaires walking in our midst. Nearly 1 in 20 U.S. households had net worth exceeding $1 million by 1998, according to a study by New York economics professor Edward N. Wolff. The number of millionaire households jumped 58 percent from 3 million in 1995 to 4.7 million in 1998, the study says. Many of those newly minted millionaires rode the booming stock market in the '90s. In a different league are the multimillionaires, including some entrepreneurs who founded successful high-tech companies. The ranks of decamillionaires -- those with net assets of more than $10 million -- reached 239,400 households in 1998, nearly quadruple that of 1989. Though the new multimillionaires don't get much sympathy, Goldbart, the psychologist, says a young entrepreneur suddenly earning a big pile of money can experience unforeseen problems. Young millionaires may feel aimless after very early retirement, experience guilt for their wealth or feel alienated from friends. One Pittsburgh technology millionaire in his 30s, who asked that his name and company not be named, says wealth has a way of complicating things. "There is a lot of jealousy. Even people who you think of as your friends, think deep down, 'Why not me?' Nobody is happy about someone else getting money. People are generally gracious to you, but deep down, they are not happy. Everyone hopes that everyone else bombs. They get perverse glee about things not working out." Dave Mawhinney, 37, an Internet millionaire who lives in Fox Chapel, says success hasn't spoiled his friendships. But occasionally he hears about secondhand cracks made behind his back . "There are people who I thought were my friends who have made remarks, who are jealous of me. I guess it's the whole competition thing. Maybe this will motivate them to have their own success." Millionaires in their 30s generally feel more tension than ones in their 20s, Goldbart says. "In your 20s, you are learning what you can do in the world. But when a person is in their 30s, married with kids, they realize their mortality. Things starts looking a little differently." Kumar, a mere 25, hasn't noticed any salary-envy or resentment over his baby-baron status. "If people have felt it, I haven't noticed it." There has been a slight difference in the way people have treated him since he sold his company, but it's so subtle he can't even articulate it. "It's nothing hostile, but they expect you to be different. I would be happy if they didn't do that." His work friends say there has been no change in Kumar, a likable guy with no airs about his intelligence or his money. He talks about money as though it were as abstract as a math formula. It's a fallback, he says, that will let him take another entrepreneurial risk some day. Though he is always sending his grandmother in New Delhi generous gifts, such as a television and DVD player, Kumar isn't splurging on himself. He eats at Mad Mex in Oakland after 11 p.m. because the Mexican food is half-price. He drove his 1988 Toyota Corolla until it conked out and borrowed the car of his live-in girlfriend, a fellow Carnegie Mellon grad. It was only when his girlfriend told him to please get his own car that he took his first and only splurge as a millionaire -- a Toyota Four Runner SUV. Not exactly wretched excess. "He is the most frugal person on the planet," Lovicks says. "Did he tell you he got rid of his furniture? I don't get it. I think someone should teach him how to spend money. I tell him to get a bigger house, bigger gadgets. But it's not his nature. He is a simple guy. It is kind of refreshing. There are millionaires, it doesn't change them. It doesn't define them." Kumar doesn't want much stuff, but what he has he keeps clean and immaculately organized. His desk, a makeshift secondhand one, is covered with neat rows and columns of pink Post-it notes, which he affectionately calls his "stickies farm." Two robot dogs sit in his office, and the computers that bring him some 60 e-mails a day are named Retriever, Labrador, Dachshund and other canine names. He loved having dogs as a child. But there is no puppy running up and greeting him at home because he is hardly ever at his apartment, where he has finally put some posters on the wall. The fantasy of working stiffs -- to walk away from the office and hang out and travel -- sends a shudder down him. Even during his annual trips to India, he is in constant contact with his office via the computer. "I think I'll never take a vacation like going to the beach," he says. "The joke around the office is I wouldn't know what to do with myself."
  
It's Friday night, and Kumar is out for a rare night of relaxation. He and a group of work friends have gone straight from the office to Dave & Busters, the vast game-filled arcade and restaurant in Homestead. Kumar could pass for a brainy but struggling graduate student, slumpily dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt that says, "What part of 'www.get.lost.com' don't you understand?" This week has been exhausting even by his manic standards. Helping to integrate SneakerLabs' systems into those of E.piphany's necessitated a whirlwind of travel: Monday in Philly. Tuesday in Boston. Wednesday back to Pittsburgh. Thursday in San Francisco. Then back to Pittsburgh on Friday. Kumar brings his girlfriend, a slim attractive woman whose name they insist stay out of the paper, part of Kumar's unflinching rules on privacy. Inside the blinking, bleating players' palace, he plays video games even though they really aren't his thing. It is the one area where he doesn't excel on the computer. "I don't have the attention span," he says. So he usually begs out quickly from the Quake computer shootout tournaments at work. But Kumar is game for anything this night. He blows up some buildings on a shoot-'em-up game. He then paddles and rocks back and forth furiously on a whitewater rafting machine. For a minute, caught in the sheer hilarity of the game, he looks like a goofy 25-year-old, not a driven entrepreneur. Then Kumar plays a low-tech game of skeeball. The ball keeps draining past the 40- and 50-points circles, only to land in the 10-point circle. The game ends. The machine spits out one lowly ticket, while kids next to him get dozens of tickets. "I guess it isn't my game," Kumar says laughing, momentarily set back in his quest for a Tweety Bird prize. That's OK. Manu Kumar is good at other games with a better payoff. |
