by Courtney Boyd Myers
“Do you think computers are meant to crash every three to four years?” I asked Jonathan Hefter, the CEO of Neverware, a start-up based in New York City.
He digs under his desk, laughing and pulls out a pair of lady’s pantyhose. “There are two things in this world planned for obsolescence. Computers and pantyhose. They are designed for the dump.”
While an undergrad at Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania, Hefter studied economics. Not wanting to go into finance after graduating in 2009, he spent a year tinkering in his parent’s lonely basement in Englewood, NJ. While he’d never taken a computer class before, the concepts of networks came naturally to Hefter. While hashing out his dream to create sustainable computing, he successfully developed the world’s first “juicebox.”
In early 2010, he set up two technology pilots in area schools, which proved to himself and others that the concept could work. In the spring, at the Kairos Society’s Annual Summit he was approached by Polaris Partner Peter Flint, who invited him to become a resident of Dogpatch Labs.
In May 2010, Hefter, now age 25, founded Neverware, a company that is akin to the fountain of youth for computers and moved into NYC’s Dogpatch Labs. The company’s flagship product, the JuiceBox a100 is a single server appliance that, when added to a network, will power up to one hundred old desktops with Windows 7. Under Hefter’s desk is a 10-year old Pentium 3 computer, your typical “general piece of crap computer,” with a missing hard drive (pictured above right). Using his college laptop as a monitor, Hefter demos Neverware’s power.
