When Jonathan Lei was in seventh grade, he bought a server on eBay for $6 to host websites for himself. That eventually turned into hosting websites for friends, and then for paying customers.
Lei, a rising senior at Acton-Boxborough High School, has since built his hobby into a business run almost entirely by Massachusetts high schoolers.
TensorDock hosts its own servers across 11 data centers from Boston to Singapore and sells its services to customers like funded startups and university researchers. Lei says the company is profitable, and had around a dozen full-time employees over the summer.
Becoming a founder
Lei’s journey to entrepreneurship started because of a YouTube channel he ran to make videos about airplanes. Lei wanted to create his own website to associate with his channel, but couldn’t afford the monthly fees most services charged to host a page.
“I kind of always had this attitude of if no one else can do it for you, then you can just do it yourself,” Lei said.
So he bought the server on eBay to host the website, and everything was going well until one day when his mom walked into his room and told him the monthly electricity bill had gone up $40 because of his server.
“That’s when I realized I either had to make money or I had to downscale,” Lei said.
He started hosting websites for friends, and later, for strangers online. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Lei said he got interested in machine learning and the idea of starting his own company. Hosting HTML pages was easy for servers in the $100 price range, Lei said, but for AI he was looking at a price tag of around $10,000 each for faster, bigger servers.
“We’re talking about super high-performance machines that are really optimized for high-performance computing at scale. These machines can allow people to run huge machine learning models,” Lei said.
Lei registered the TensorDock domain in 2021 and started onboarding paying customers at the start of 2022. Today the company has nearly 1,000 monthly paying customers with hardware at nearly a dozen data centers around the world.
Lei said the company has been able to keep costs down and pass the savings along to customers by building its own hardware and software.
“We have our own supply chain. We can build servers around 10 times cheaper than if we were purchasing them off the market,” Lei said. “And that really allows us to sell to our customers at 10 times better prices.”
As TensorDock's technology upgraded, so did its customers.
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Lei said the company's customers include people who render animations or films, compress videos or use machine learning (like this site that turns text into original art). One customer works at a university in Tokyo, and uses machine learning to predict how floods would impact different areas of Japan.
“There are a bunch of customers where we can’t ask what they’re doing, because what they’re doing is confidential. But the ones we do get information from it’s really empowering to know that the work that we do is actually helping them better their local communities,” Lei said.
TensorDock will publicly launch its new marketplace product next week. The marketplace will be a spot for independent hosts' servers, with a TensorDock cloud built on top, to compete against each other for pricing, uptime and internet connectivity, letting the customer choose the best option for them.
An army of high schoolers
TensorDock’s team has grown quickly since its official launch at the start of 2022. Lei said around 12 people worked full-time this summer alongside six part-time contractors. The team includes students from Westford, North Reading, Acton and Littleton.
Suryaa Rajinikanth joined TensorDock in April. He just graduated from Westford Academy and plans to attend the University of Maryland this fall. Rajinikanth met Lei at the FIRST Robotics program and joined TensorDock to help lead the team creating software for the upcoming marketplace launch.
“A bunch of my friends, either they’re not doing anything, or even if they’re doing something at a bigger company, they’re not able to contribute as much as I’ve been able to contribute here,” Rajinikanth said. “The summer interns at those bigger companies, they’re not able to see their changes even make it to production.”
Amanda Sherman joined TensorDock in July as an outreach lead. The 18-year-old spent the summer building case studies and documents that the startup can use to target higher-value customers. Sherman said she first worked with Lei and several other team members to organize Hack3, the largest hackathon for high school students thus far this year.
Sherman said she enjoyed working around other young people who share her understanding and experiences with technology. She said it helps them connect with each other and better serve their customers.
“We grew up from the time we were very young with smartphones, computers, internet and we saw the rise of AI, robotics,” Sherman said.
Lei said he prefers to hire high school students, not only because he's a student himself, but because high schoolers are at the stage in life where they can soak up information quickly while also having a strong math background.
“They can develop beautiful, amazing, scalable code and they can learn very quickly. And if you actually look in the real world, I feel like the ability to learn is much more important than what you’ve actually learned in college,” Lei said.
