Anthony J. Mauceri

At 8 years old, Anthony started his entrepreneurial journey. Wanting to play Minecraft but not having the resources to do so, he began doing bottle returns. He would ask his neighbors if it was okay for him to go through their recycling bins, collecting bottles and taking them to the grocery store.

After saving up to buy Minecraft, he realized his computer couldn’t run it. With whatever spare change he had left, he went to the craft store and started selling little googly-eyed characters for $1.50 to $5 each until he saved up for his first gaming computer.

Playing Minecraft, Anthony found his first real community, Apple King Craft (AKC). Moreover, he was given his first real responsibilities: he was a moderator of AKC. It was his duty to protect the community and make sure everyone played fair. After a few years, the server was shut down; it wasn’t economically viable. Just like that, the community he was tasked with protecting was ripped from him. So he decided he was going to start his own.

He started paying a server host for the infrastructure to host AJCraft, his own community. But he quickly realized something:

If he didn’t control the infrastructure on which his community was built, then he was in no better of a situation than he was with AKC. They could raise rates tomorrow or go out of business entirely.

Servers are e-waste. Servers that are no longer economically viable for most businesses were totally fine for running his Minecraft server. So he went around Long Island collecting old networking gear and a 42U server rack from local businesses.

Anthony turned the basement of his mom’s dental office into a Minecraft server farm and started Andromedacraft, a platform where he could build custom mini-games and environments with his friends and share them with people all over the world. Eventually, people started paying him to host their own Minecraft servers.

Today, Anthony views the world as one big Minecraft server, and his job is to build tools and resources to make it easier for people to build their dreams and share them with the world.