When you think of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, a few names pop into mind; Elon Musk, Bitcoin, and the Terminator.
With the speed at which technology is moving, there are always new kids on the block when it comes to crypto and AI. And in this day and age, where the globe is connected more than ever through the Internet, you never know where the next big tech star is going to be from.
Such is the case for 24-year-old Sambhav Thapaliya. Sam is the founder of two (so far) companies; ASMI, a cutting-edge advertising company, and Zebec, a money transferring software that utilizes blockchain technology. But how did this brilliant visionary achieve all his success?
Contradictory to being born and raised in Silicon Valley, California, Sam Thapaliya was born on June 28, 1997, in Nepal. This was a rough period of time in recent Nepali history, as it was right at the height of the Nepalese Civil War. As a result of growing up in a small Nepali town, he did not know computers existed until he was thirteen years old! Despite his late start, he managed to create an ERP- or in layman’s terms, management- software within the first year he even encountered a computer. He also discovered what a bank was for the first time. Clearly life has a sense of humor considering Zebec, his widely used second company, is all about blockchain for business finance.
Developing his computer skills became somewhat of a hobby that Sam saw high potential in. He continued learning how to program through the Internet, and at age fifteen, created a software similar to one of the most popular gaming applications used today. He developed a program similar to Discord, an application for gamers used to voice chat and text chat while playing video games. To his dismay, no one used it, but that only fuelled Sam’s determination to make something big.
When Sam graduated high school, a huge earthquake struck Nepal. As a result, Sam took two and a half years off before university to teach himself how to program with all the available knowledge he encountered on the Internet. He developed an accounting software that gained traction in Nepal and Southeast Asia, but realized that he would not be able to grow his company to its fullest potential in the area he was from. As a result, he sold the accounting software and turned his focus elsewhere, which was going to school in the United States. Ideas never stopped cooking in his mind while he was in Nepal, though. Before he went to school, inspiration struck him while scrolling through videos and advertisements on the Internet, and the idea for his first wildly successful company ASMI was born. He then went to college at Menlo in Northern California where that same idea, now fully formed into a company, won an award Menlo College 2020 Entrepreneurship and Innovation Award. The rest is history.
