Ben Pasternak

Ben Pasternak is a 26 year old entrepreneur who discovered that he enjoyed technology when he was still in high school. He was in class one day, when he got bored and he began teaching himself the basics of coding. He started working on simple coding projects for fun and eventually created a videogame that gained millions of downloads. Pasternak saw how many people had downloaded his game, and knew that he needed to apply that reach to another field. Pasternak had noticed that a growing number of young people had started using apps like facetime to have short conversations with friends or family. This realization prompted him to create an app called Monkey. It is an app for quick video chats with friends, but it even allows you to broaden you horizon and speak to new people. This feature allows you to be exposed to potential friends around the world that otherwise, you never would have known even existed. This is a particularly innovative feature, that, while it did exist, was not used very often. Pasternak showed entrepreneurship skills by improving and developing this particular feature in video calls, and, in a sense, woke up a sleeping market. As Pasternak himself said, “We were just fulfilling a need no one else was meeting.” Pasternak is unique from other entrepreneurs because, his work started from a boring class, that made him think his time would be better spent learning code. If not for that class, he would not have needed a pastime and therefore may never have learned how to code. Pasternak inspires me by showing that even if a particular market seems like it won’t ever catch on, there are usually ways to revive it. His work clearly demonstrates his ability to see problems and focus his attention on how to solve them in a productive manner.