When we moved everyone at Coursicle to New York, it was finally time for Coursicle to actually start paying for an office (we had worked out a public open space, basically an indoor park, in San Francisco so we could save money). Visiting all of these places was really fun, and we absolutely love where we ended up: Nomadworks.

We really care about our employees, so we wanted to help our interns out by finding them affordable housing options for the city. We also created this resource.

Once we started hiring employees, we wanted to be able to give them t-shirts and other goodies with the Coursicle logo on it. We originally bought CustomInk which turned out to be a huge mistake, the shirts were crappy quality, and the printing was bad. We got a full refund for those shirts, and decided to go with Merchology. I went through every product that Merchology sold, and found these items that I sent to the team, who then gave their ratings for each item which we then ordered samples of to try them out. In the end, we only bought shirts we really liked, and our frineds and family loved them. Brands were Nike, American Apparrel, etc. Really high quality shirts, and great printing.

Preparation for my call with Google.

A list of start-up accelerators that we were planning to apply to, their location, how good we felt about them, how much money they offered, etc.

My aunt wanted to help sell Coursicle to universities, so we put together a document that she could refer to when she was trying to pitch.

Tara took ES 95r, taught by Paul Bottino (great guy) which allowed you to work on your start-up. I came to one or two classes and talked with Paul a couple times, as well as worked on the things Tara was doing for class too.

Someone must have insisted we fill out one of those business template things.

Tara and I created two massive spreadsheets to keep track of all of the academic advisors, Registrars, Provosts, etc that we were trying to sell Coursicle to.

I vaguely remember Tara insisting that we apply to this, and I guess we used one of my ideas. I think we got through the first stage but I just refused to show up because I knew it was going to be a bunch of business bros and I just didn't want to go.

This contains the notes from about a month's worth of research to try to understand networking. It was strange being at Cisco because at first I didn't understand any of the technical lingo, and so it felt like how it must feel to nontechnical people when programming is being discussed, which was kind of a cool feeling. I watched a ton of videos to compile this information. One funny anectdote is that I told Tara that I was watching networking videos, and she thought I meant business networking and started to judge me. Eventually it came out that I was talking about computer networking, which was a pretty funny moment.

When I was a freshman, I originally wasn't planning on getting an internship. I was just going to work on Class Checker over the summer. Then right before the summer started an email went out to the CS students about an internship at Shoeboxed called "Start your own startup". They liked the projects I had done and commented on how it was impressive for a freshman, so I got the offer. I was working with a graduate student in business at Duke and a recent grad from NC State. I was the only tech guy, but my teammates were very sweet and supportive. We played a lot of ping pong that summer, and I had a good time hanging out with them.