Unschooled

Nick

Hi, I'm Nick. This is my blog. I'm a life-long unschooler living in New York. You can find more about me here.

I help run the Recurse Center (YC'S10).

Follow me @nicholasbs

An abridged timeline of the past 15 years of my life

March 29, 2010

1995 - I founded my first company, CoolMan Inc., releasing a GameMaker adventure game called "The Quest v. 1.0" on AOL. Despite being terrible in virtually every respect, a thousand people downloaded it at keyword:file search.

1996 - I founded my second company, Lightning Productions. And by "founded," I mean I started listing it in the optional "company" field when filling out forms online. I got junk mail addressed to Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, CEO, Lightning Productions for years.

199? - Sometime in the late 90s, I decided I wanted to start a real company some day.

199? - 200? - I spend a bunch of time reading about startups and entrepreneurship.

2006 - I met Dave (previously known to me as "that guy who comes late to Signals & Systems").

2007 - Dave and I decide to found a company together and start tossing around ideas.

2008 - Dave and I start having business meetings (i.e., walking around New York talking). Some friends don't think we're actually serious about this.

2009 - Dave and I start evaulating ideas more seriously. We consider everything from peer-to-peer psychotherapy to selling ice cream. We spend nearly six months exploring medical software, only to find our favorite ideas existed.

January 30 - During a brainstorming session led by my father, we developed a few more ideas that we really liked, and decided to iterate on each to see where they went.

March 1 - We decided to create a jobs website to match people with jobs they'll love.

March 3 - While starting to write a business plan, we decided to fill out a funding application on a whim.

March 5 - I tell work that I'll be leaving this summer to start a company, regardless of if we get funding. Most people think I'm crazy to leave a job I love in the middle of a down economy to start a company without any funding.

March 6 - We submit our application late.

March 14 - We receive a delightfully concise email saying they liked our application and want to meet in person.

Today, 10:50am - We had a ridiculously fun interview.

Today, 5:35pm - Funded.