Personal Life and Education

Kaplan was raised near Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, Illinois. He attended Glenbrook North High School

Glenbrook North High School

Glenbrook North High School, or GBN, is a public four-year high school located in Northbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States...

, and in his senior year, built a working model roller coaster

Roller coaster

The roller coaster is a popular amusement ride developed for amusement parks and modern theme parks. LaMarcus Adna Thompson patented the first coasters on January 20, 1885...

. Kaplan graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Career

Kaplan's career began while a senior at the University of Illinois. He co-founded a custom software development company called Lever Works with Keith Schacht and Brian Witlin

Brian Witlin

Brian Witlin is an American businessman, serial entrepreneur, designer, and teacher who currently serves as the CEO and Co-Founder of ShopWell. Witlin participates as a lecturer at Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design and as a startup mentor at 500 Startups a seed venture...

. In December 2001 Lever Works was sold to Leo Media.

In 2002, Kaplan co-founded Inventables, a company that connects product developers with novel materials. The company's success garnered media attention for Kaplan. He was featured on National Public Radio in 2007 and presented a talk on "Toys from the Future" at the TED Conference in 2005. The company's products have been featured on the show Prototype This! on the Discovery Channel

Discovery Channel

Discovery Channel is an American satellite and cable specialty channel , founded by John Hendricks and distributed by Discovery Communications. It is a publicly traded company run by CEO David Zaslav...

.

In January 2009 TechCrunch

TechCrunch

TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....

reported Kaplan raised $2 million dollars from True Ventures a venture capital firm located in San Francisco. With the funding Inventables launched an online marketplace for materials where vendors can create free product profiles to advertise their products and engineers and designers can find these materials.