Bio

Entrepreneurship / By

Andrew Bellay is a 3-time entrepreneur, self-taught coder, 3-degree holding, problem solver & meta-engineer. Andrew is a jack-of-all-trades and even a master of a few…

Andrew has been featured in The Chronicle of Higher Eduction, and Fast Company; He’s recently spoken at the Campus Technology Forum in Long Beach, CA & Boston, MA, AlwaysOn Silicon Valley Innovation Summit, Stanford University, and The University of Texas at Austin.

Andrew Bellay

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Jack of All Trades, Master of Some

  • Skiing since he was 3 years old
  • Teaching himself to code
  • Two, very different engineering degrees & a liberal arts degree
  • Founding two iPhone app companies
  • Working directly with Apple, Stanford University, and the University of California school system to make awesome apps for college students
  • Transforming from an introvert to founding a network-building organization (FounderSoup)
  • Winning the Intuit Mobile Payments with QR Codes Challenge
  • Fuel Cell research at UT Austin
  • Not sleeping for 89 days (polyphasic sleep experiment)
  • Overseeing the production of 2.5% of US gasoline production when he was 19

Mobile App Expert

Andrew is an expert app developer – especially in iOS (Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices). He has built dozens of apps for companies, friends, family, universities, and many more for personal use. Andrew taught himself to code while earning his master’s degree at Stanford. He snuck into Stanford’s world-renown iOS class in order to hear Paul Hegarty’s amazing lectures. He spent months hitting his head against the wall for 14-18 hours a day until he slowly discovered the secrets of not only Objective-C but also learning to code in general.

Since then, he’s saved others thousands of hours and has helped some seriously smart people pick up languages in an afternoon (80/20 rule). More importantly, he’s been able to separate out the coding part from the app part  (product management). The key insight was realizing that coding is only 20-40% of the work that goes into most app development and wondering why it seems to get 90% of the effort and attention.

Meta-Engineer

Andrew is an accomplished engineer. He was trained in Chemical Engineering at UT Austin and in Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. Andrew used to work for the world’s largest producer of oil and gas (non state-owned by the Saudis, Russians, or Iranians) and got to do some really cool stuff. Was he was just 19, some smart & risk-loving folks at Exxon saw potential in him and let Andrew handle a billion dollars of product/month overseeing the production of 2.5% of the nation’s entire gasoline supply. Initially, he always hid the fact that he was a new-hire because people treat new-hires like crap. Over time, it didn’t matter because he re-wrote the rules his way. Soon after putting himself on the fast-track at ExxonMobil, Andrew left to pursue dreams of a cleaner energy future. His passion for clean energy even brought him into the lab where he worked and eventually published Direct Methanol Fuel Cell research in the Journal of Power Sources in 2008. His passion for energy was soon over-shadowed by a bigger challenge: education.

“Education in this country is fundamentally broken,” Andrew says, “I was in school a long time and I found that I spent just as much energy playing the game as I did actually learning something.” In response to this realization, Andrew and a high-school friend quit their jobs and began a company that literally gamified the higher-education experience. There was significant controversy over their mobile that let students check into class for small rewards like free coffee and burritos. It was during this time that Andrew coined the term MetaNeer (Meta-Engineer) – the modern day problem solver – and realized that entrepreneurship is the most effective/practical vehicle for changing the world. Since then, Andrew has founded 2 other companies and advised countless others.

VC & Money

Andrew also has some awesome ties into the investment community – especially in Silicon Valley where has interviewed awesome Venture Capitalists like Tim Draper (DFJ), Greg Gretsch (Sigma Partners), Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge Capital Partners), Tim Chang (Norwest Venture Partners), Woody Benson (Prism VentureWorks), Victor Boyajian (Global Chair of the Venture Technology Group, SNR Denton).

While covering the Venture Capital sector at AlwaysOn, Andrew’s also worked with awesome VCs, entrepreneurs, writers, and innovators like Bill Gurley (Benchmark Capital), Tim Draper (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Mark Cuban (Owner of the Dallas Mavericks), Steve Blank (serial entrepreneur and Stanford professor), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Mark Suster (GRP Partners), Jeff Bussgang (Flybridge Capital Partners), Bijan Sabet (Spark Capital), Greg Gretsch (Sigma Partners), Rob Go (NextView Ventures), Paul Kedrosky (Financial Blogger and CNBC Commentator), and Chamillionaire + Tony Perkins + Mike Arrington + Robert Scoble.

Andrew follows hot companies in Mobile Advertising like Nexage and Mobclix and rumor has it that his article was used in negotiations of the acquisition of Mobclix by Velti. He’s also very passionate about clean, renewable energy so he’s covered CoolPlanet BioFuels a few times to keep up with their awesome work. He  used to write for World Energy Blog (those posts are now on andrewbellay.com).

What Can Andrew Help With?

Andrew enjoys empowering others to change the world so let him know how he can help out, especially the following:

  • Advice or connections
  • Speaking to your employees or students
  • Guest writing about entrepreneurship for your blog
  • Mobile App Development (Andrew specializes in the rapid prototyping of iOS apps in days, not months)
  • Beta-testing iPhone/iPad apps & web apps
  • Start-up advisory roles

Andrew holds the following degrees (all before turning 25)