📱 Meet the 19-year-old Founder Chatting with Mark Cuban and Elon Musk

Joel Hansen

Jun 24, 2022 • 5 min read

Howdy Builders,

Welcome back to the Kernal newsletter: the top inspo to get you off the Netflix binge and get back to the startup wins 🏆

In news this week: Crypto is limping, FDA said TTYL to Juul, and Twitter is wetting their beak with long-form blogs. It's the last week of June and most of ya'll are probably sick of seeing Collision Conference IG stories by now. We know how it is. To give you something fresh, we leaned on our handy dandy Twitter handle to have some fun. Skim below to get a sneak peek 👀

✈️ Hot Seat with the Twitter Famous Founder of @ElonJet
🚀 Startup ideas you'd wanna drop a cheque in
👨‍🏫 Tweet of the week from Bezos

Top up the Nespresso, today's newsletter is better than Monday night pasta and pesto 🤌

🔑 Hot Seat with the Founder of @ElonJet

Jack Sweeney isn't your average student. And you aren't our average reader. So just like Mrs. Beasley taught us in grade 8 math, we put 2 and 2 together to come up with something spectacular.

If you haven't already heard about Jack's viral Twitter bot that tracks private jets based on open-source data, you're in for a treat. If you wanna brush up on some pre-reading, you can find his stories shared across Business Insider to Yahoo and beyond.

Too busy to read them? Same page. So we threw together our own fireside chat with Jack answering over email on 1) how he got a hold of Elon 2) when he pounces on ideas and 3) where he'd like to be in 10 years. Let's dive in👇

🌱 Kernal: Top founder you'd like to have a coffee with?
✈️ Jack: Elon Musk probably of course!
🌱 Kernal: First "aha" moment that led to ElonJet?
✈️ Jack: Bored during COVID and finally got to work. I had the idea for quite a while, I knew Elon Musk had a jet, and I knew about flight tracking platforms like FR24 and FlightAware. As seen in this tweet, I first talked about it in Jan 2020.

🌱 Kernal: They often say ask for forgiveness vs permission. It looks like you did that exact thing with getting Mark Cuban and Elon Musks' attention. What advice would you give other builders trying to get a dream investor's attention?
✈️ Jack: Well these billionaire celebrities are so busy you can't really ask for permission so you just have to go for it.
🌱 Kernal: What are your favourite spots on the internet to learn and hang out?
✈️ Jack: Discord, Reddit, Twitter, programming websites. Used to play Minecraft a lot, fun creativity, and probably where I learned about computers a lot, the architectures behind servers and installing programs on computers etc.

🌱 Kernal: What’s the next project you have your eyes on?
✈️ Jack: Taking audio control livestream from SpaceX and live logging the audio to text to a website that shows the transcript to a T count.
🌱 Kernal: What’s the biggest thrill for you when building an idea?
✈️ Jack: Figuring out how I can make it work and then doing it and seeing it work.
🌱 Kernal: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?
✈️ Jack: Likely working for a flight tracking platform or operating my own software aviation platform.

🌱 Kernal: How do you know if an idea is worth pursuing vs keeping in the notebook?
✈️ Jack: Usually if it's the right idea, sometimes it's really a temporary idea that isn't full proof, when something better exists you should work on that instead of something that is just easier. A lot of it is just time, like do I have time for it or is the outcome worth it.
🌱 Kernal: What’s something you do out of habit that others would find unusual?
✈️ Jack: Poor software management, I push new code directly to production and usually watch it fail, because I'm too lazy.

So there you have it, folks: Jack Sweeney. The 19-year-old founder that has won the world's attention, built something out of the box and is chilling in the DMs of with tech's favourite billionaires. And the guy hasn't even graduated yet.

Wanna connect with him? Slide into his Twitter DMs and let him know Kernal sent ya. If he gets a 100 DMs, maybe he'll help Kernal land a jet when we hit 1m users 👀

DM @ElonJet Founder Jack

🚀 Startup Ideas of the Week

Baby boomers like to keep their money in the bank and Daymond John likes to keep his shark in the tank. We've dropped our top ideas of the week below. So go put on your angel investor gloves and dig in: