从火爆全美的社交软件到植物性炸鸡块,19岁的Pasternak一直在引领潮流

Serial teen tech entrepreneur Ben Pasternak made his fortune creating social apps and games that, he now says, wasted people’s time and contributed negatively to the wellbeing of humans.

Now the 19-year-old, Australian-born high school drop-out — who lives alone in his New York high-rise apartment — has turned his focus to reinventing the chicken nugget.

Not content with the way the nugget is now, Pasternak believes he’s created a snack that tastes as good, if not better than McDonald’s McNuggets — but with no chickens harmed in the process.

Backed by Canadian food giant McCain Foods to the tune of US$7 million as a lead investor, as well as by a slew of other traditional tech investors of Silicon Valley, Pasternak’s latest venture NUGGS uses pea protein, spices and food-based technology.

Its creation comes after Pasternak sold his former social media ventures Monkey, a video chat app for teens that matches them with other random people with similar interests, and Flogg, a buy-and-sell platform leveraging Facebook connections, and iPhone game Impossible Rush.

Pasternak gained fame when his iOS app Impossible Run topped the App Store charts, attracting the attention of a number of Silicon Valley investors at the age of 15. At 17, he was running his New York-based US$2 million company which includes a seven-member team of mostly teenagers and young people in their early 20s.

The young tech entrepreneur says, after a period of “going back to first principles,” he realized what he was initially told by tech venture capitalists wasn’t necessarily the right thing to pursue. That advice, he says, was connecting people using social apps designed to keep people engaged for the most amount of time per day to make the most amount of money.

“As soon as I raised money [when I was 17], I was told that the best way to have an impact on the world was to connect people and that’s why I got into social apps in the first place,” he says.

But after pursuing this for almost five years, his thinking changed after he saw first hand the negative impact these apps were starting to have not only on his own life, but that of his friends.

“I felt like not just with Monkey, but with all social apps, how much time people spend on an app a day makes very bad outcomes,” he says. “These large companies have huge teams of people who are essentially brain-hacking [people].

“They are finding out what animations and what content to show people that will essentially release serotonin [an important chemical in the brain believed to help regulate mood] to make them addicted to these social apps and I think ... that it’s [creating] a lot of brain pollution.”

But Pasternak stressed his negative views on social apps are entirely towards the larger companies. “There are many great smaller social apps that are connecting people in positive and meaningful ways,” he says.

He has a dire warning if we keep going down the path we’re presently on with social apps. “Social companies that were once connecting us are no longer doing that. They are now no different to ... I’d put it up there with negative drugs or negative substances.”

The son of wealthy Sydney property developer Mark Pasternak, the tech entrepreneur says he doesn’t use Instagram himself and has switched his iPhone to gray-scale mode, which some believe makes a smartphone less addictive to use.

A vegetarian, Pasternak says he hopes to encourage people to take up more sustainable eating not by using alarmist language but by creating a better rival to animal-based meat to lure people to buy his plant-based nuggets, which cost US$24 for 50 or US$29 for 80 nuggets. (SD-Agencies)