Recent years have brought a storm of techies from Silicon Valley and beyond pouring down on LA’s hills and the beach cities below. In March, a man named Wayne Chang paid $4.2 million a house on famed Sunset Plaza Drive.
Chang, a child prodigy, reportedly wrote his first software program when he was seven years old. By the time he reached high school, Chang was involved with all sorts of ventures including the original Napster. Then, while attending college in Massachusetts, he founded i2hub.
Novel peer-to-peer file-sharing system i2hub was loved for its fast download speeds by the high school and college students for whom it was created, but unsurprisingly loathed by organizations such as the RIAA, who eventually succeeded in having the wildly-popular site shut down permanently.
But the shutdown did not occur before Chang’s system had attracted the attention of the Facebook founding crew (Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, Andrew McCollum, and Adam D’Angelo) who quickly launched a competing service called Wirehog. Unfortunately for them, Chang already had a near-monopoly on the market and Wirehog floundered, ultimately being nixed by its founders.
i2hub also attracted the attention of those infamous Winklevoss twins, who took the opposite approach as Zuckerberg and decided to partner with Chang — creating the Winklevoss Chang Group.
At some point, Chang and the Winklevii were sued by Facebook in regards to the twins’ ConnectU social media website. If y’all saw The Social Network, y’all should know that the lawsuit was eventually resolved by Facebook acquiring ConnectU in a cash-and-stock deal.
Unfortunately, the Chang-Winklevoss partnership soon dissolved and in 2009, Chang sued the Winklevoss twins for 50% of their Facebook settlement money. Though a Massachusetts judge finally reached a decision in favor of the Winklevii, the case continues on appeal.
In the meantime, Chang hasn’t been weeping over his lack of Facebook money. In 2011, he founded Crashlytics, which he sold two years later to Twitter for somewhere around $38 million.
The contemporary home is perched hard up on the street. Almost every room has beautiful skyline sights. The main living area encompasses a large Poggenpohl kitchen with two center islands.
The flooring switches from shiny white tile to shiny black wood in the family/living room and the bedrooms. There’s also a party-sized bar area with a flatscreen and stool seating. Somewhere there’s a beige-carpeted media room/theater with a 120-inch projecter screen, per the listing. There’s also — somewhat unusually — a hidden “security camera monitoring room..
Though the house has no grassy yard, it does sport a surprisingly-commodious outdoor terrace that the seller adorned sparely with a small table and chairs.