At the age of 15, Ben Pasternak – an Australian native – found himself to be extremely bored in his high school class. Needing to do something to cure the boredom, Pasternak thought out and designed an app he named Impossible Rush. This app was a brain teaser game that would go on to dominate app charts worldwide, beating out big names like Tinder, Vine, and Twitter. Ultimately, this became Pasternak’s first success and one that would take him down the path of entrepreneurship.
In April 2015, Pasternak had moved to New York City for an internship and had also moved on to his next project: Flogg. This was an app created for young people to buy and sell. This early success caught the attention of investors like Binary Capital, Greylock Partners, John Maloney and Paul Bricault. although Flogg was highly successful and reached number one in the app store, Pasternak shut the app down in 2016 to pivot the company to work on his next idea.
His next project was an app called Monkey, which was an app that enabled teenagers to video chat with others of like mindsets. After raising about $2 million in funding, this app became a reality. This was yet another huge success for Pasternak, again reaching number one in the app store and getting over 20 million users. In 2018, a social networking company called Holla purchased and acquired Monkey for a sum of money, allowing Pasternak to move on to yet another brilliant idea.
In early 2018, Ben Pasternak – now at the age of 19 – cofounded SIMULATE. SIMULATE is a nutrition tech company who’s mission is the upgrade the world to a positive food system. They think of it as a nutrition company that operates with a software framework. The first product was NUGGS which is a chicken nugget substitute made out of plant-based protein. The company initially had $11 million in funding from investors helping it to stand out and out compete in the area of development.
Overall, Ben Pasternak’s story is one of early success that turned into many profitable and great venture from a young entrepreneur.