Andrew Perlman (born June 19, 1975) is an American entrepreneur who has co-founded nine venture-backed companies in the telecom, high-tech, pharmaceuticals, energy, water, and biotechnology industries.
[3] Perlman and GreatPoint Energy have been profiled by The Wall Street Journal,[4] NPR,[5] Forbes,[6] and Fast Company.
At age 12, he began tracking down the owners of dormant bank accounts, and taking a 20% commission in exchange for leading them to their forgotten money.
[3] Perlman began college at Washington University in St. Louis, and as a sophomore he attempted to license and commercialize a university-owned technology to prevent credit card fraud.
[citation needed] Perlman and a friend dropped out of Washington University and moved to Washington D.C., where they “hung around business and government offices, knocking on doors, asking anyone they could find about some kind of new technology they could turn into a business.”[8] The two had little technical education, but through research and trial and error, they built a device that converts voice calls into a data format.