Instead of going to college like most 17 year olds, Chris Kelsey had bigger visions. In December 2014, he left high school six months before graduating with a 4.0 GPA to start his third company Appsitude, after two previously failed startups. His parents initially weren’t very happy to say the least. Their attitudes changed when he received his first app development contract for $16,500 within one month of leaving school. Within the first three months, he had over $100,000 USD worth of development contracts. Not bad for a 17 year old with no high school diploma.
When he turned 18 in mid-2015, he moved out of his parents’ house and began traveling the world with a base in San Francisco, which led him to countries like Brazil and Costa Rica. In the past two years he has traveled to almost 20 different countries, mostly for business. By the end of 2015, Appsitude had made a profit of over $300,000 USD ($500,000 in revenue).
While he was off to a great start, not everything went according to plan. He says when he was in Costa Rica in June 2015, one of his clients failed to pay him $50,000 on time, as it turned out they did not actually have the money for the second part of the contract. This led him to run out of money, leaving him stranded with almost nothing while in Costa Rica. He had just paid his 8 employees and had to think of something to fix the situation. He was able to close another deal online one week later and things worked themselves out.
In February 2016, his company skyrocketed from $500,000 revenue in the previous year to $420,000 in just one month, due to a large $370,000 contract they had received. His company was growing rapidly, now with 25+ employees globally, and a development office in Lviv, Ukraine. By July 2016, his company had already begun working with superstar celebrity groups including Upfront Megatainment, which includes music artists such as Akon. Chris recalls meeting Akon at a private event in LA, where someone introduced Chris to Akon as the “app guy” and Akon gave his number to Chris, saying he wanted to work with him.
During this time, Chris visited countries such as Sweden, Singapore, China, Malaysia, Germany, Spain, Mexico, the UK, and many more countries. He most recently co-founded a company called Cazza, with 26-year old Fernando De Los Rios (previously Appsitude’s COO) a construction technologies company focusing on construction automation to reduce construction costs/timeframes of housing for the exponentially growing population. He was using the funds from Appsitude to build out his new project, which he says was his big vision idea. Some of Cazza’s technologies includes using portable 3D printing machines that can take 3D designs and literally 3D print concrete, earthquake-proof homes onsite, which saves up to 90% of labor and material costs. It’s also environmentally friendly because it only prints materials as needed, which means there is minimal leftover construction waste and no air/water pollution.
In the beginning of October 2016, Appsitude (which had 64 employees at the time of acquisition) was acquired by Deepansh Jain, an Indian entrepreneur & investor that has built and sold numerous companies, most recently Shifu, which was sold for $8m USD to Paytm (lead investors include Alibaba) in January 2016. He invested in startups such as Travel Triangle, where his shares have grown 200x since originally investing four years ago.
Chris is now busy running Cazza, which is planning to begin offering their technologies and construction materials to real estate developers and construction companies globally in December 2016.
