Every technology startup seems to have a humble-beginnings story. Steve Jobs had his garage, Mark Zuckerberg his dorm room.
Andrew Mayhall and Kyle Goeken, a pair of St. Louis entrepreneurs who hope to revolutionize the data storage business, recently had their road trip.
Mayhall, 19, and Goeken, 20, were headed to Silicon Valley to show off Evtron, their ground-breaking hardware company. They had been offered a spot at the prestigious DEMO conference, but paying the $8,000 entry fee was a stretch. They decided to drive to save money.
Halfway there, their bank account ran dry. Conference organizers had double-charged them for the entry fee, so their debit cards didn’t work.
Fortunately, Goeken had a Shell credit card, and gasoline and convenience-store food were all they needed to complete the trip.
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Once they got to DEMO, their luck improved. The fee problem was sorted out, and Mayhall, Evtron’s founder and chief executive, says people liked his technology. He will be back in California soon trying to raise $1 million or more from investors.
Mayhall, who grew up in Edwardsville, started the company three years ago in his parents’ basement. In May, it moved to the Railway Exchange Building in downtown St. Louis, which is home to dozens of other startup companies.
None of them can rival Evtron for its combination of youth and brash ambition.
Mayhall, a technology prodigy who started tinkering with computers at age 8 or 9, skipped high school and took college classes before dropping out to work on his own projects.
He first thought he could write software that would make data storage servers more efficient. “It wasn’t really working, so I decided, ‘Let’s take a dive into the hardware,’ ” Mayhall recalls.
He and Brady O’Brien, Evtron’s chief technology officer, figured out a way to stack hard drives vertically, instead of horizontally, and use the base of the rack as a kind of heat sink. The result, Evtron claims, is a storage server that uses 45 percent less electricity, generates 38 percent less heat and takes 66 percent less space than the industry average.
In a large data center, Mayhall says, the savings could be millions of dollars a year.
Mayhall says he realizes that if he can prove that the technology works, he could sell it to a big technology company for a tidy sum. He’s thinking bigger than that, however: He wants to build an industry-leading firm with a presence in St. Louis.
“The ultimate goal of Evtron is to grow up and be a major player like NetApp and EMC,” he says, mentioning companies with annual revenue of $7 billion and $22 billion, respectively. “We are truly disruptive in this business, and we are going to take it by storm.”
Brian Matthews, a technology entrepreneur who has advised Evtron, doesn’t think Mayhall is exaggerating the firm’s potential. “It’s a real problem that they’re solving,” Matthews said. “I have a hosting business, so I understand those costs and those savings.”
One hurdle, he says, is that “St. Louis isn’t really a hardware town.” If it’s really going to scale up and mass-produce data servers, Evtron will need two things that are hard to find here: money and an experienced management team.
Mayhall says he knows that he may have to move to California to attract investors, and that at some point he’ll need to partner with experienced executives.
He would like to keep St. Louis as Evtron’s base of operations, even though it would be unprecedented to run a big hardware company from this part of the country.
“I like to think of St. Louis right now as a primordial soup,” Mayhall says. “It’s capable of starting life, but sustaining it? People have questioned that. I feel like it’s possible, but nobody has proved it.”
Perhaps this 19-year-old entrepreneur will be the one.
David Nicklaus is business columnist at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Subscribe to his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter @dnickbiz.
