Before this summer, Luc and I knew each other from our first year at the University of Virginia back in 2000. As we finished up our respective MS programs at UVA and Georgia Tech, we we looking for roommates in Northern Virginia. Eventually, we moved in together for about a year.
In the next year, I decided to go back to UVA to pursue a PhD in systems engineering, and Luc continued to work for one of the big telco companies. During one lunch during the early summer of 2007, we began to think that we should take a stab at creating a website. We saw how all these new websites were grabbing our attention, and we decided that we’re qualified enough.
Later that summer, we decided to go off to Annapolis for a weekend. There would be few distractions, and we would just come together to brainstorm ideas. We had some laptops and a couple coffee shops and the whole weekend. You can see a screenshot of our Writeboard document below. It’s nothing too fancy or innovative.
The sad thing is that we found a website that was doing something very similar to each idea on our list. Eventually, we took these 10-odd ideas narrowed down to 3. Then, we had a long discussion about those 3 ideas. We decided on one.
By that time until now, Luc has become quite the guy to talk to about Ruby on Rails, Ruby on Ramaze, and Java on Ubuntu. Hence, we started programming in Ruby on Rails.
At first, this was a weekend thing, but we both knew that this summer would be crucial. As a part-time deal, we could both put in the effort into refining the idea, buildings the prototype, and seek funding. Lucky for us, now, we have all three!
In later posts, we’ll start talking about particulars of taking our time to build ShareMeme, and hopefully our example will be a lesson for what to do and not do for others.
