The first potential technical co-founder of Smarterer couldn't start exactly just yet.

Nope, he had to go to Burning Man first. To 'free his mind.'

Naturally.

This shortly after agreeing to be a co-founder, but first taking a 6-week trip to some unpronounceable jungle on some unchartered continent.

So I told him he wasn't co-founder material. That he lacked commitment. This potential co-founder thought of me as an a∞hole.

Not that he was incorrect - but two wrongs don't make a right.

The second (potential) technical co-founder of Smarterer and I met once a week.

He understood the vision:

To validate anyone's skill in anything - be it excel or python or R or photoshop - in just 10 questions, 120 seconds.

In cafes we snorted coffee and bonded. I the forty-ish elder statesman of entrepreneurship, he the shaggy-haired, wet-behind-the-ears technical wonderboy.

But he found the technical challenge a jigsaw puzzle, with edges bent and cardboard frayed and pieces missing.

After nearly nine months he informed me, 'only the impossible is impossible' - and so we parted ways.

The third technical co-founder of Smarterer was introduced by an acquaintance from the Boston tech ecosystem; this only after - like a snotty toddler - I wept on his shoulder about the challenge of co-founder matchmaking.

There was a guy who (rumor had it) spent the better part of a decade in a secret lab in EMC's basement; he built hardware and produced patents, he coded software. He was mathematically correct.

He went by a slick moniker: Mike PK.

Mike PK and I agreed to meet for a beer in Kendall Square where an hour or two and a pint or three slipped by; I gripped the table for balance as I stood while Mike PK, slightly larger than me, appeared as sober as a stray cat. 

Mike PK calls one day, ecstatic. He knows how to unsquare the cube, to restructure the molecular dna of things, to abstract the canonical into a linear formulation.

He had an idea. And it was a brilliant one.

"Do you play chess?"

"Of course, but, well, not really," I admitted.

"Do you know what an ELO ranking is?"

This I couldn't even partially fake

"Ok, how about bayesian algorithms?"

If this were a math test, I'd surely be failing. 

And so MikePK began his education; he provided lessons and papers to read; he offered concepts to study and algos to decipher. He was a willing teacher, I a motivated but easy-to-distract pupil.  I picked up almost every other word - and nary a single equation. 

_{^{Here we will summarise some important equalities about the Gaussian density.  A Gaussian density in Rn is defined by:}}

_{^{N(x;μ,6):=(2π)−2 |6|−2 exp − (x−μ)T6−1(x−μ)}}

_{^{We will write x ∼ N(x;μ,6) to both denote x has a distribution P(x) and that the density of this distri- bution is given by (1.1). We will write N (x) as a shorthand for N (x; 0, I). For t ∈ R, we will denote the cumulative Gaussian distribution function by 8(t;μ,σ2) which is defined by...}}

And the more Mike PK illuminated, the more sure I became.

I had the early vision, and I could raise the venture money, build an exceptional team, and create commercial partnerships and drive outcomes.

And Mike PK, as sure as a rook takes a pawn (and as every hustler requires a hacker), would be able build the impossible.

And so, in early 2010 we agreed: We would co-found the illiterately-named Smarterer together.

Decisions like these are not to be taken lightly, because co-founding a company is a sexless marriage (typically...and in everyone's best interests), fraught with compromises, bound by the willingness to navigate a single path together, hoping your motivations and routes rarely diverge.

But cofounding, above all else, requires a bond of trust.

Which is a shame because, in this case, there was a bit of trust I was about to break. You see, during all this co-founder dating, I was concurrently navigating the sale of BzzAgent - to free myself to take on this new challenge. One company complete, and then another begun, it would all be pit pat, tippity tap, just so.

But I failed to realize that the sale of BzzAgent might come with a few commitments on its own. And in this case, those were the shackles of a four-year employment agreement.

And so, with the ink still fresh on our co-founding agreement, and before we'd so much as built anything at all, I approached Mike PK with my sailor's cap in hand.

I think, well...you see...so...there's something I need to tell you...

And that's how I let my new co-founder know that the first major order of business - besides him cracking the code on a challenge two others failed at - would be the need to find ourselves a brand spankin' new CEO. 

Seems we'd need to add one more variable in the equation...

_{^{[to be continued]}}