• TC Readers Give Gumball Capital More than $10,000; Make Kiefer Do Some Weird Stuff (TCTV)

    Sarah Lacy

    Sarah Lacy writes for PandoDaily, a news site which she founded. She is also an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” (Gotham Books, May 2008) and “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos... → Learn More

    Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

    A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about Travis Kiefer, a kid who worked brutally hard to get into Stanford, took time off to build a non-profit called Gumball Capital, and decided to raise money by running a marathon on every continent. It was one of the more passed around posts I’ve ever written with more than 1,200 Facebook “likes,” 800 retweets and RTing this actually made my username a national trending topic on Twitter for a brief period.

    More important, TechCrunch readers donated more than $10,000 to Kiefer’s nonprofit. The deal was Kiefer would do something crazy for each $27 donation. Since he was going to be in Antarctica for a week, he figured he’d have plenty of time. And then he got stuck in Chile for three days. Oops.

    I caught up with Kiefer from my parents house in Memphis and his parents house in South Dakota to hear how it all went. If for no other reason, watch this to see how much he looks like Kenneth from 30 Rock.

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