Monday, March 11, 2002

Information Technology

Whiz kid is tech muse: Shomo, 17, is CEO of network company

By Todd Neff

Justin Shomo, chief executive officer of Denver's TransWAN Corp., is in many ways a typical telecommunications entrepreneur. He recognizes market gaps and dreams up services such as point-to-point DSL to fill them. He is a technical whiz, having written the computer code behind some of his company's core offerings. His hobby is his work.

But unlike most telecom entrepreneurs, Shomo has less than two years experience in the field. His previous employer was a McDonald's in Broomfield. He lacks a college education. He resides with his mother, and, according to TransWAN's co-founder and chief operating officer, "lives on Mountain Dew."

Justin Shomo is 17.

Entrepreneurship is hard enough for those over the voting age. Fortunately, Shomo has some help. Trans-WAN operates as part of Comfluent, a seven-person telecommunications collocation company located in the Denver Gas & Electric building in downtown Denver. Alfred Gardner, Comfluent's CEO and, at 48, about three times Shomo's age, is also TransWAN's chief operating officer (he and Shomo are TransWAN's sole employees). Shomo serves as chief engineer for Comfluent.

Shomo always has had an interest in computers. He received his first one at age seven. "Within the first week, I tried to open command.com in the text editor, and it broke the machine," Shomo said.

About five years later, Larry Coulson, who now oversees operations and tech support for Denver-based Internet service provider foreThought.net, got a call "from a very nice lady who didn't know anything at all about the Internet but wanted to buy an Internet account for her son's birthday," he said.

Coulson came to know Shomo and his mother, who raised Justin and his younger brother alone, and at one point drove to Broomfield to deliver a replacement modem. Coulson saw that the 12-year-old was programming batch files in DOS. "The little guy would fall asleep reading the manual," he said. "I was just amazed."

Coulson kept in touch with Shomo, who by his mid-teens was setting up an IP network in the house. Coulson said Shomo's mother "(doesn't) have a lot of money and never had a lot of money." In 2000, Coulson said he asked Shomo how he paid for his growing hardware collection. "He said he was working at McDonald's," Coulson said.

From the time he turned 14, Shomo worked 20 hours a week at the Broomfield McDonald's. "For the most part, I did drive-thru," Shomo said. He boosted his efficiency by taking the next order as the prior vehicle awaited its food. "It was comparable to a model of computer multitasking," he said.

Coulson was in the process of selling his ISP business to foreThought.net. "I couldn't hire him, but I was working very closely with Alf (Gardner) and was able to convince him to take a chance on the kid."

Shomo's work with Comfluent began with a summer 2000 internship at age 15. He has since built enough expertise in telecom protocols such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) and Ethernet that Gardner, a network expert, said he tries to "stay out of the way." Coulson refers to Shomo as "a phenom."

Shomo graduated from Broomfield High School in 2001, completing a four-year program in three years. Of the experience, Shomo said, "I was quite bored." He was equally bored last fall while enrolled in the computer science program at CU-Boulder.

JoAnne Gearhart, Shomo's counselor at Broomfield High School, characterized Shomo as being "off the charts" in intelligence and largely self-taught, acing the Physics SAT 2 test despite coursework that didn't cover all the material.

Socially, Shomo had little in common with most students. "He was just so far beyond his peers, it was difficult," Gearhart said. "He had a few friends and they all talked about computers. He had no interest in the social aspects of high school."

At TransWAN, he said, he gets to build interesting networks.

He came up with the idea of point-to-point DSL when looking for a high-speed connection between his Broomfield home and Comfluent's downtown offices. He found that he had the choice of relatively pokey ISDN at 64 kbps, or a blazing frame relay, or T-1 connection at 1.5 mbps, which cost about $650 a month. Figuring DSL would be cheaper, he set up a DSL host access link at Comvergent, ordered DSL service at his house and had them connected. He now has a virtual 1 mbps connection to the office, about 20 times faster than dialing in.

Through TransWAN, Shomo now sells point-to-point DSL service. He also markets something called MetroLAN service, an extension of this product made possible by software he wrote. Shomo said that MetroLAN allows hundreds of LANs to communicate with each other. "We encapsulate LAN technologies on DSL," he said. "The software basically enables all of the locations to send Ethernet packets to each other. Packets only go to the intended destination network because it learns what (LAN) nodes are on what DSL lines."

Shomo said he created the software late last year, spending four hours a day coding "in between a couple of classes." The result, Shomo said, is a virtual private network at far lower cost.

It's enough to make a mother proud - though, according to Shomo, "She doesn't understand any of it."