Chatroulette’s Founder Almost Misses the Plane

The New Yorker had a long interview with the teenager creator of Chatroulette.  Below is the ending of the piece by Julia Ioffe. She follows Andrey Ternovskiy as he almost misses a plane to the US and scowls at his overprotective mom, who’s worried he’ll forget his backpacks.

“When he travelled to San Francisco, the following week, he found the America he had imagined for himself. The sunshine was “heaven,” and he was able to work poolside at his hotel. He soon moved into his own apartment in downtown Palo Alto.

He missed his mother’s “sailor’s spaghetti,” a Russian classic, subsisting as he was on a diet of Banana Nut Cheerios. But he was happy, and busy. Shervin Pishevar, the founder of Social Gaming Network and an informal investor in Chatroulette, had taken Andrey under his wing. He helped him navigate meetings with investors, took him to visit Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, and set him up with lawyers to get him an O-1 visa, for exceptional persons, which might allow him to stay in the U.S.

Ternovskiy planned a trip to Las Vegas and bought a bike, a nice one, for twenty-four hundred dollars. It was stolen the next day.

He also travelled to West Virginia to meet Kirill Gura, the friend he had chatted with on MSN Messenger every night for years, but whom he’d never actually met. The transition was bumpy. “It was a little weird, you know,” Ternovskiy told me later. “We was just looking at each other without having much to say.”

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