Wednesday, June 15, 2005

How it all Began

It all began in college... I (Mark Polson) was going to school at the University of Utah studying business. As hard as I tried, I couldn't really figure out how I could go from being a "B" student to an "A" student. It drove me crazy. I became obsessed with the challenge. Each semester I would try some new strategy, but most of my ideas seemed to have little impact on my GPA. So I started talking to "good students" about what they did, and found they were way ahead on everything, which seemed crazy to me, but whatever they were doing worked, right?

My last semester as an experiment I decided that I was going take every homework assignment, reading, quiz, and test, and estimate the time it would take me to do each. I finally made a great discovery of why I was getting crushed by the school system. I always thought the workload was pretty even, but when I graphed it out, I realized it was terribly unbalanced. I thought back to all the semesters where midterm and finals week were hell and realized this was why. One week I would have five hours of homework and the next week I would have twenty-nine hours. My last semester I was working two jobs and realized that during the insane weeks I would be destroyed. So I spread out the homework from the intense weeks to the easy weeks and voila--that semester I almost got straight "A's". I even had a professor tell me that if he could have he would have given me an "A+". This was truly a different experience for me. Anyway, I thought I better show my best friend Taylor what I had done. Taylor was going through the pre-pharmacology classes like Organic Chemistry, Anatomy, and all of those highly competitive classes. I sat down and worked out Taylor's schedule with him, and again it worked like a charm, he did better in school with this than he had been doing before, which got me really excited. However, Taylor pointed out a major problem with my approach--it needed to be "dynamic" so if he missed an assignment it would automatically adjust the schedule. Regardless of my excel wizardry, this wasn't something I could figure out. As I walked back home to my apartment I thought, “this needs to be an online database that is dynamic”. Taylor and I happened to know a guy that we went to high school with named Mac Newbold that was a genius on online databases using PHP. I called up Taylor and said why don't we see if we could get Mac to do the programming for this. So we met with Mac and he agreed to do the programming, and that was how our team was founded, on June 14, 2005.