This essay is based on a conversation with 16-year-old Toby Brown in the UK. His visa, fundraising, and the fact that he left school have been verified by business insiders. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
On my 16th birthday, I found out I had raised $1 million for my AI project, Beem. Of course, I was excited, but I had to exercise if it was even legal to skip the exam first and leave school.
Thankfully, my school was excited by the meaning of the news to me. When I first told my friend, I was planning to go to Silicon Valley about a week before leaving this June, so they responded with a mixture of excitement and shock. No one saw it coming, and some friends didn't believe me at first. I think they thought I went home and studied the same way as everyone else.
I had to explain to myself that I would actually run a company, take this investment and leave the country before I took my high school exam.
I'm always interested in nature
As a child, I was interested in nature about the world around me and was fascinated by how things worked. I was interested in the alarm system, locks and other strange things.
My parents aren't technicians, my dad works in marketing, my mother works in healthcare – and that wasn't about making my resume. I just followed my curiosity and they gave me a space to explore Something I found interesting.
For my 7th birthday, I wanted the Raspberry Pi, an inexpensive coding computer. After that, you can use whatever you can get to code mainly YouTube and Google tutorials yourself.
I came up with something I wanted to create, like building an alarm system, even a math game, so I won't be able to stop until I understand how to do it.
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When I was nine, I realized that there weren't many people who shared my interests. It was a very isolated experience. I went home from school and spent the rest of my time trying out technology. Then I'll go back to school and not talk to my friends.
I was an average student
After a typical school day, I went home and rushed to finish my homework. At one point I created a program that would do part of it for me by gathering information from Google Classroom and entering it into an early language model. It produced some meaningless things, but it was one of my first revelation to AI – a clever way to cheat.
I cut the school down as an “average” student. I love learning, but it's not the schooling process. I prefer to learn in my own words. It will often do it until early in the morning.
In 2023 I developed the concept of Beem and started building it myself. That was quite a job. I can't share much about it, but it's a blend of my ideas and exploration.
I hope that if done correctly, it redefines how people interact with technology. My goal was to reduce the time spent on things I didn't want to do all the time and build a protective dome around what I wanted to do.
Instead of graduating from school, I decided to work full time. The best way to make that possible was to get funding for the venture.
The area around London's Old Street is sometimes called “Silicon Roundabouts.” Through Mike Kemp/In Getty Images
During the summer break in August 2024, I biked to various offices in my hometown of London, explaining my products to some companies and pitching them to others. I then did a round in New York and later Zoom, a venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
No one coached me when it came to pitching to investors, so I just took the maniacal approach of bashing it until I got the right solution. Every time I changed the storytelling, zoomed in on some aspects, and changed things that were not specific about other aspects depending on the audience. I was lucky that this came to nature.
In November 2024, I met a fund called South Park Commons, established by some of Facebook's earliest engineers. I went in with real excitement, but I think they responded to it. I was with my mother and our dog when they received a call saying they wanted to invest $1 million in my project. “It happened.” It felt like an in vitro experience. My mother's reaction was one of the great shock and excitement.
Before that, it was great to be able to skip all of that, as the reality was I was just doing the exam. There was no doubt that the project would work. Still, I want to be qualified in high school. I plan to spend a few weeks preparing for next year's exams to prove I can get them.
Downtown Palo Alto is one of the major cities of Silicon Valley. Dee Liu/Getty Images
I had to obtain a visa for foreigners with “abnormal abilities”
Silicon Valley has not only something I have felt elsewhere, but also the energy and excitement I can't explain, so I decided to move to California. I didn't have a high school diploma, let alone a university degree, so getting a visa was tough. For the alien of “extraordinary ability” I had to get an o-1 visa with a prominent name.
The thrill of investment was curtailed by having to wait several months for the visa to be approved. I felt paralyzed waiting for the letter to arrive so I could go to California. It was October and I was 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 a self-driving car.
Don't copy me, follow your own curiosity
My primary advice for those who want to do something similar to younger people is not. Follow your curiosity and do something new. When you are young, you have no work or bill constraints on your curiosity, so find what you are obsessed with and work on it.
My second advice is to speak up about your work. Post as anywhere you can and you'll find a community that continues. He posted progress to X, which has around 8,000 followers. It attracted the interest of venture capitalists.
And finally, let's become fantasies! You have to be this infected, positive person who is obsessed with what they are creating. If you are doing what you find your curiosity for you, in my mind, in my mind, that's how you can succeed.
