IOTA Founder: This Is Behind The Success Story

22 years, self-made billionaire: the crazy success story of the Iota founder.

Dominik Schiener grew up in a South Tyrolean mountain village. The mother cook, the father bricklayer. Then he invented the crypto currency Iota – and today the 22-year-old owns a four-billion-euro company. In the talk show of Markus Lanz he tells his fascinating story.

At the age of just 22, he has accomplished what other founders can only dream of. Dominik Schiener’s startup IOTA is worth four billion euros today. Iota is Germany’s largest cryptocurrency and among the top ten virtual payment instruments in the world. It all started in Schiener’s nursery, as he told ZDF on Tuesday evening in conversation with Markus Lanz.

The founder grew up in a small mountain farming village in South Tyrol. For rebels like him, the place did not have much to offer. He chased time by playing games on the net. At the tender age of 14, the youngster came up with the idea that he could make quick money with the help of the Internet. He hacked into the computer game “Call of Duty” (CoD) – and wrote himself in No. 1 ranking.

“I have always had a bigger vision of what I wanted to achieve in life”

“Of course I had a bit of life left and I did not just play all the time,” Schiener said last week on Markus Lanz’s late-night show. But gambling and programming was especially good – and he uses that. So he came up with the idea that probably other players wanted to have a good ranking with CoD and the best weapons. So he got them what they had 22 years and offered – for 50 euros. So the teenager earned his first money.

It was the beginning of a purposeful entrepreneurial career. “I’ve always had a bigger vision of what I wanted to achieve in life,” says the Iota founder confidently. At the age of 16, Schiener founded his first company. There companies could advertise on the Internet, for every ad click the teenager got money. He managed all this from his nursery.

The school on the other hand bored him and ran rather alongside. “I was missing 25 percent of the time,” Schiener told Lanz. That was pretty much the maximum absenteeism the school allowed. “If you miss too much, you will not make it, even if you have good marks,” explains the 22-year-old.

At the age of 17, he was in debt – and found a solution for it

At the age of 16, he joined the cryptocurrency business by chance. He had since founded several companies and one of them had credits worth 10,000 euros, with which he could book computing capacity in cloud computing. He uses the money to “mine,” that is, to create new cryptocurrencies.

The virtual currencies fascinated him so much that a year later he moved to the Swiss town of Zug to build a trading platform for cryptocurrencies there. But he failed and life in Switzerland was expensive. Quick the teenager sat on 5000 to 10,000 euros debt. His parents knew nothing.

“Then I thought about how I could solve the problem,” said the young entrepreneur at Lanz. The solution came in the form of an Iranian, who was looking for a company headquarters in Switzerland for tax reasons – and summarily bought Schiener’s company.

From his nursery began the billion-dollar project
At the age of 19, Schiener travels to Shanghai for a hacker competition – and wins it. The prize money of 30,000 euros, he invested again in cryptocurrencies. Within a few months, his fortune grows to 200,000 euros.

To his parents Schiener still made his high school diploma. His mother, a cook, and his father, a bricklayer, want their son to have something tangible. Schiener agrees – on one condition: After leaving school he gets a break to work on a new project in his nursery.

The new project is the crypto currency Iota, which Schiener founds together with three other programmers – whom he does not even know personally. “We got to know each other through a forum and exchanged our work there,” said the founder at Lanz. It quickly becomes clear: The four young men have the same ideologies and interests.

Today Iota is worth four billion euros. The idea of ​​networking machines using an Internet currency – the Internet of Things – has met with great interest in industry.

The algorithm behind Iota allows for thousands of parallel transactions per second. The processing is therefore much faster than with the crypto Dino Bitcoin. Therefore, there are experts who prophesy a great future for Iota in industrial applications. Dominik Schiener is working on it.

IOTA-Gründer: Das steckt hinter der Erfolgsgeschichte was originally published on focus.de. It was translated by the IOTA-News Community. The Community curates, examines, and summarizes news from external services while producing its own original material. Copyrights from external sources will be credited as they pertain to their corresponding owners. IOTA-News.com´s purpose is to make use of partial 3rd party content or pictures as either allusion or promotional endorsement of mentioned sites.