Rishi Bhat

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Rishi Bhat is a former child actor and noted internet entrepreneur. He co-starred alongside Hal Scardino and Litefoot in the 1995 film The Indian in the Cupboard, for which he received a Young Artist Award nomation. He went on to become a prodigy and millionaire - starting the internet privacy company SiegeSoft and selling it for an estimated $40,000 cash and 1.5 million shares (worth roughly $3.4 million at the peak stock price) during the dotcom boom of 2000, at age 15.^[1] Bhat received widespread media attention in 2000 after selling SiegeSoft, appearing on television programs including Good Morning America, CNN, and MSNBC. He has also appeared in BusinessWeek,^[2] Entrepreneur Magazine,^[3] and the Financial Times. Less than 2 hours after Bhat's March 22, 2000 appearance on Good Morning America, the share price of publicly traded Zimtu Technologies (formerly Rocca Resources), the Vancouver-based mining penny stock firm that purchased SiegeSoft, hit an all time high of $2.24 - nearly double the $1.22 it was trading at six weeks prior.^[4]

The purchase of SiegeSoft by Zimtu (the shares of which are now worthless) is often thought to have been part of a pump-and-dump on the part of Rocca's owners, although this is only speculation.