This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Toby Brown, 16, from the UK. His visa, fundraising, and the fact that he left school have been verified by Business Insider. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
On my 16th birthday, I found out that I’d raised $1 million for my AI project, Beem. Of course, I was excited, but first I had to work out if skipping exams and leaving school was even legal.
Thankfully, my school was excited about what the news could mean for me. When I first told my friends I’d be going to Silicon Valley, about a week before I left in June this year, they responded with a mixture of excitement and shock. Nobody saw it coming, and some friends didn’t believe me at first. I think they just thought I went home and studied like everyone else.
I had to explain that I actually ran a company, got this investment, and would be leaving the country before taking my high school exams.
I’ve always been naturally curious
As a child, I was naturally curious about the world around me and fascinated by how things worked. I was interested in alarm systems, locks, and other bizarre things.
My parents are not technologists — my father works in marketing, my mom in healthcare — and it was never about building my résumé. I just followed my curiosity, and they gave me the space to explore what I found interesting.
For my 7th birthday, I asked for a Raspberry Pi, a cheap coding computer. After that, I’d use just about anything I could get my hands on to teach myself coding, mainly tutorials on YouTube and Google.
I’d come up with something I wanted to make, be it a math game or building an alarm system, and I wouldn’t stop until I figured out how.
When I was about 9, I realized that not many people shared my interests. It was quite an isolating experience. I’d get home from school and spend the rest of the day experimenting with technology. Then, I’d go back to school and not talk about it, even with my friends.
I was an average student
After a typical school day, I’d get home and rush to finish my homework. At one point, I even built a program that would do some of it for me by gathering information from Google Classroom and inputting it into an early language model. It produced some nonsensical stuff, but it was one of my first exposures to AI — a smart way to cheat.
I scraped through school as an “average” student. I love learning, but not the process of schooling. I prefer learning on my own terms, which I would often do until the early hours of the morning.
In 2023, I developed the concept of Beem and started building it myself. It was quite an undertaking. I can’t share too much about it, but it’s an amalgamation of my ideas and explorations.
I hope that, if done right, it will redefine how people interact with technology. My goal has always been to reduce the time spent on things you don’t want to do and build a protective dome around what you do want to do.
I decided to work on Beem full-time instead of finishing school, and the best way to make that possible was to get some venture funding.
During my summer recess in August 2024, I biked to different offices in my hometown, London, explaining the product to some firms and pitching to others. Then, I did the rounds in New York, and later Silicon Valley and San Francisco-based venture capitalists, over Zoom.
There was nobody to coach me on pitching to investors, so I just took a maniacal approach of bashing away at it until I got the right solution. Each time, I’d change my storytelling, zooming in on some aspects and being less specific about others depending on my audience. I was lucky that this came naturally to me.
In November 2024, over Zoom, I met with a fund called South Park Commons, founded by some of Facebook’s earliest engineers. I went in with real excitement, and I think that they responded to that. When I got the call that they wanted to invest $1 million in my project, I was with my mom and our dog. I just said, “It happened.” It felt like an out-of-body experience. My mom’s reaction was one of great shock and excitement.
Before that, the reality was that I’d just be doing my exams, so being able to skip all of that was great. I had no doubt the project would work and that it was what I wanted to spend my life on. Still, I’d like to have high-school qualifications, to prove that I can get them, so I plan to spend a few weeks preparing for exams next year.
I had to get a visa for foreigners with ‘extraordinary ability’
There’s an indescribable energy and excitement in Silicon Valley that I just haven’t felt anywhere else, so I chose to move to California. Getting a visa was hard because I didn’t have a high school diploma, let alone a college degree. I had to get an O-1 visa, pompously named, for aliens of “extraordinary ability.”
The thrill of the investment was dampened by having to wait months for the visa to be approved. I felt paralyzed waiting for the letter to arrive that would allow me to go to California. It’s October and I’ve been here for three months. So far, living in San Francisco is the most exciting thing I’ve ever experienced. The weather is nice, and we have self-driving cars.
Don’t copy me, follow your own curiosity
My No. 1 piece of advice to anyone young and wanting to do something similar is don’t. Follow your curiosity, and do something new. When you are young, you don’t have the constraints of jobs and bills on your curiosity, so find something you’re obsessed with, and just work at it.
My second piece of advice is to be vocal about your work. Post about it everywhere you can, and you’ll find a community that follows. I’d been posting my progress on X, where I have about 8,000 followers, which attracted the interest of some venture capitalists.
And finally, be delusional! You’ve got to be this infectiously positive person who is obsessed with what they’re creating. If you’re doing something your curiosity found for you, rather than just an easy way to make cash, in my mind, that’s the way to become successful.
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