Kyle
St. Louis startup Evtron, and it’s pair of founders still too young to drink alcohol, are looking to take on stage server hardware space.
The story of Evtron co-founders Andrew Mayhall and Kyle Goeken, will be one for the entrepreneurial history books, if their innovative startup takes off. To kick off their story though, they went on a road trip.
Mayhall and Goeken had received the almost golden ticket. Their startup was selected to pitch at the recent DEMO conference at the Santa Clara convention center in Silicon Valley. We say “almost golden ticket” because they weren’t quite lucky enough to get one of the highly coveted “scholarship” spots, but nonetheless the opportunity to pitch that crowd is one you can’t pass up.
Now most bootstrapped startups have a hard enough time coming up with the $8,000 to just get on the stage at DEMO, (that’s why conferences like everywhereelse.co charge much less). Combine that with the fact that Mayhall is only 19 and Goeken is just 20 and that’s a lot of lawns to mow and burgers to flip.
Regardless of the hardwork the duo had to put in to raise the $8,000 the story of their road trip hardly ends there. The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports that to save money they elected to drive from St.Louis to Silicon Valley. Surely that’s no big deal for two young adults but the Post Dispatch continues on to report that the folks at DEMO mistakenly double charged the teams debit card, rendering them completely broke in route.
Goeken was able to save the day because he luckily had a Shell gas card. So with a card for fuel and all the beef jerkey and other great gas station food they could buy, the two would finally make it to the conference.
Mayhall is one of those prodigal entrepreneurs. He began tinkering with computers when he was 8 or 9. He dropped out of high school to attend college early and then dropped out of college to work on his own ideas.
One of those ideas is Evtron. Mayhall synced up with now Evtron’s Chief Technology Officer, Brady O’Brien to revolutionize the server industry. Evtron has found a way to stack server hard drives vertically instead of horizontally. They also found a way to use the base as a “heat sink”. When coupled together the Evtron server uses 45% less electricity, generates 38% less heat and takes up 66% less space. When considering huge data centers the size of say Google’s (that were revealed to the public earlier this week) you’re talking about savings in the tens of millions.
While we are constantly covering the St. Louis startup scene , St. Louis isn’t known for being a hardware town.
Brian Matthews a local St. Louis tech entrepreneur who’s been advising Evtron, agreed that St. Louis isn’t a hardware town.
“If it’s really going to scale up and mass-produce data servers, Evtron will need two things that are hard to find here: money and an experienced management team” Matthews told the Post Dispatch.
As St. Louis’ startup community continues to grow, hopefully Evtron will be able to find a fit, and a way to stay in the city. Mayhall said that is one of his goals.
Linkage:
Check out Evtron the next generation storage platform here.
Here are more startup stories from St. Louis
Source: St. Louis Post Dispatch
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