Brian Wong Gets $4.3 Mil. for Kiip

Brian Wong's Kiip ad network lets advertisers engage gamers by offering rewards for virtual triumphs.

Giving $4.3 million in venture funding to a startup run by a 19-year-old sounds crazy until you hear Brian Wong talking about Kiip — an ad network that lets advertisers reward mobile gamers at the moment of their greatest virtual triumphs.

The idea came to Wong after sneaking peeks at mobile phones and tablets while walking down an aisle on a flight. Mobile gamers, he concluded, were the “holy grail of engagement”. The way to tap their consumer clout isn’t to put random banners on their game screens the way mobile networks are doing today but to offer them a reward — say, a burger to the boy who slaughtered a million aliens and some lip gloss to a girl who clawed her way to the top of a gentler, cattier social game.

The idea sounded good to advertisers like Carl’s Jr, Sephora and PopChips. And True Ventures and Hummer Winblad decided the venture merited $4.3 million in funding, letting Wong hire some staffers recently.

Brian Wong skipped four grades in order to graduate from the University of British Columbia in 2009 at the age of 19. His first job was in business development at Digg. That ended in a layoff which left him open to the business opportunity offered by the Kiip concept. Despite a preternaturally articulate and poised personal style, Wong admits to having some trepidations about being a teen seeking large sums of money from strangers old enough to be his parents.

“Obviously I’m a human being, it’s intimidating,” he told TechCrunch. “You walk into this partners meeting — I didn’t know what a partners meeting was when I was first going to raise money — and there are people there that are going to be your future if they accept you. And you have to be able to talk to them and be able to relate.”

“I like to call it ‘Inception,’ like the movie,” he says, explaining his formula for being persuasive. “You have to seed the idea first, you have to let them think of it as well at the same time you’re revealing it. If you have that parallel, then you have them. The vision is now in their head.”