Software Development

After their hack went viral, these Penn freshmen got recruited by Nest

The four Penn students are now working for Nest in California. But they'll be back in the fall to start their sophomore year.

She's listening ?. (Screenshot)

A crew of four Penn students went from PennApps to TechCrunch to Nest in just a few months.

Ben Hsu, Ajay Patel, Alex Sands and Gagan Gupta — all freshmen at the time — built a Siri hack at PennApps Spring 2014 and won second place. Their tool, GoogolPlex, lets users use the iPhone voice-command tool to do things like open Spotify and control a Nest thermostat.

Two months later, GoogolPlex got picked up by national tech news sites like Engadget and TechCrunch. The tool now has about 12,000 users, Hsu said, adding that traffic died down after the media hits.

The team isn’t working on GoogolPlex anymore. They saw it more as a hack, rather than viable business idea, Hsu said. But something else came out of all the buzz: Nest, the Silicon Valley-based home automation company, recruited all four of the them. They’re working there now.

They’ll be back in the fall to start their sophomore year as part of Penn’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology.

The team also used to run a startup called LoudCrowd, an app for professors to gauge student comprehension. They completed the eight-week PennApps Accelerator with their startup last spring but have since shut the startup down because they “thought the market wasn’t ready,” Hsu said.

You might recognize Sands’ name from somewhere else, too: he cofounded the national network of high school hackathons called Pilot.

Companies: University of Pennsylvania
Engagement

Join our growing Slack community

Join 5,000 tech professionals and entrepreneurs in our community Slack today!

Donate to the Journalism Fund

Your support powers our independent journalism. Unlike most business-media outlets, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we count on your personal and organizational contributions.

Trending

Half of Pennsylvania’s federal buildings are set to be sold under Trump admin plan

RealLIST Startups 2025: Meet 20 Philly startups hot on the track to success

Biotech startups are still winning federal grants, accelerator founder says — but the money is taking longer to trickle in

Ecosystem building is coalition building

Technically Media