Youth Served as Startup Hires 12-Year-Old Exec

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It’s no secret that tech startups are often staffed with loads of young employees.

But one local app developer is raising (or is that lowering?) the bar when it comes to hiring executives who can relate to teens.

In order to better home in on that desirable group of core users, Studio City’s PingTank, which created an app that allows people to spice up their photos with animated emoticons, hired a 12-year-old boy as its vice president of creative.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The child in question is Sammy Parsley, who started using PingTank a few months ago and emailed Jeremy Greene, its co-founder and chief executive, with some suggestions for how to improve its offerings.

Parsley, who lives in New York, happens to be the son of one of PingTank’s angel investors, Rod Parsley, a managing director at Tradewinds Global Investors.

The younger Parsley started using the app after its launch in March on Facebook Messenger.

One piece of advice he offered Greene was to bring him on board as an employee.

“The kid is brilliant,” said Greene, who added that he didn’t realize Sammy’s age or who his dad is when he read the email. “He just understands people his age. He’s got great vision.”

That’s helpful when trying to reach teens, 92 percent of whom go online every day, primarily on mobile devices, according to April data from Pew Research Center.

Greene insists he didn’t hire the boy as a publicity stunt. As vice president, Parsley reports directly to Greene, and six of the company’s animation designers report to Parsley, who has approval over all animations targeted at children between the ages of 13 and 16.

Before Parsley finished school for the year, he and Greene communicated mostly through email and Skype. But now that he’s off for the summer, Parsley has been able to travel to Los Angeles and work from the office.

“He has a real position,” said Greene. “He tells me what he wants to do and I tell my staff to do it.”

Since Parsley is too young to legally come on board as a full-time employee, Greene said he is performing work in exchange for company equity in his parents’ name.

Meanwhile, things are looking up for PingTank. The company closed a $2.2 million financing round shortly before its March launch, and it has signed deals with about 25 brands to feature their products in animations – think flaming shots of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky and Coke bottles that whiz across the screen.

Greene said brands pay between $25,000 and $100,000 for each animation.

“Brand integration is our biggest thing right now,” he said.

Fashion Forward

An East L.A. mobile commerce company is putting a twist on the typical fashion industry business model.

While clothing companies traditionally try to produce the most items for the lowest price, Yoshirt Inc. has developed a mobile app with a back-end platform that allows customers to submit a photo or design that can be custom-printed at its production facility on an individual T-shirt for $36. Designs can also be made with a variety of graphics found within the app.

The startup closed a $1.1 million seed financing round earlier this month from investors including Resolute Ventures, Mesa Ventures, Pritzker Group and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The process of turning an image into a printable graphic usually takes a significant amount of time and effort, but Yoshirt’s platform has streamlined that process, said co-founder and Chief Executive Brian Garofalow.

“We’re able to turn over a file that’s print ready,” he explained.

This technological innovation has allowed the company to think about scale in a way that’s unusual for others in its industry.

“Instead of making one item 10,000 times, we’re making 10,000 items one time,” he said.

Yoshirt launched publicly in April, though it had been in beta release since August. The 22-person startup has shipped tens of thousands of orders, according to Garofalow.

In order to avoid legal entanglements concerning copyright infringement, Yoshirt’s terms of use indicate that customers must only submit original work and the company’s software can also detect images that contain major brand logos.

“We have very few images that are flagged for intellectual property violations,” he said.

Jeffrey Glassman, a partner at Beverly Hills law firm Ervin Cohen & Jessup who’s not affiliated with Yoshirt, said the company is probably protected from liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires that rights holders whose work has been infringed upon send written takedown notices to Internet-based companies hosting the work.

“If I were a betting man, I’d say for the most part it seems like they have systems in place to protect themselves,” said Glassman, noting there’s no case law to offer guidance. “The category that makes this different is the manufacturing and distribution of a product rather than a passive server.”

Staff reporter Omar Shamout can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 263.

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