“Smarterer? That's absolutely the stupidest name for a company possible."

This overheard at Luke Miller's wedding in 2025, from the table next to ours - oblivious that one of Smarterer's founders was within earshot.

Luke's brother was giving the Best Man speech, and was riffing on the fact that Luke seemed to make illogical career choices - until they turned out to be brilliant or prophetic.

One such choice was joining skills-assessment startup Smarterer as an intern, where he eventually rose to a product manager during the successful sale to Pluralsight in 2014. Was Luke lucky or smart? Well his next gig was as an early employee at some non-profit which happened to be named, get this...OpenAI.

^{(Current value of OpenAI, $500b, so, you decide.)}

But this is all later, because back in 2011 Smarterer wasn't even off the ground, and Luke Miller wasn't even employed yet, and the company was seeking a CEO to work alongside Mike PK. As Exec. Chair the plan was for me to maintain the vision, raise the capital, and create commercial relationships - while a CEO would deliver on the day to day operations.

And, as luck would have it, I may have found a perfect solution.

And she went by a simple moniker: JFS

Jennifer Fremont-Smith was a Sloan MBA with a background as an operator in startups. She'd most recently been pitching BzzAgent as a consultant with High Start Group. JFS was a talent. She was witty, scrappy and hungry to grow.

Opportunity knocks as they say. So, would it better for her to build 2x2 matrices about BzzAgent's competitive positioning, or join Smarterer as CEO?

To be honest, Mike PK was suspect.

Not about JFS but about the whole thing.

If you're the biblical sort, you might acknowledge that Mike PK didn't know me from Adam.

Here I'd woo'd him into co-founding Smarterer, but now I was offering the CEO role to someone else. All while I planned to jetset to lallygag in London as an executive team member at some British company.

And, well, he surely didn't know JFS from Eve.

And, impressive pedigree aside, Smarterer would be her first CEO gig.

{l}And yet here we all were, an awkward trio of animals climbing aboard Noah's Ark to navigate the rolling seas of a startup.

JFS had many skills, but maybe the most impressive of them was her ability to 'growth hack' her way to results.

Her first challenge: get hundreds of thousands of people to take Smarterer tests. Given the way the algorithms were designed, this would be the only way to ensure that the tests could deliver on our magic premise: validating anyone's skill in anything in 10 questions, 120 seconds.

JFS's realization: people would take our tests if they thought it would help them land a job.

Her hack looked as follows: Smarterer would hire a cabal of interns who would spend their days scraping job openings from websites and then, willy nilly, repost them on other sites - with the small simple addition of a requirement of taking the Smarterer test to apply.

This was all well and good because all the applications would still be sent to the employer (along with the Smarterer score) so the candidate would be no worse for wear.

The Smarterer hack required playing whack-a-mole with job sites like Craigslist or Indeed or Monster - some of who would shut down our progress for being against their Terms of Service.

It required multiple credit cards, pseudonyms, and curious interns (like Luke Miller) who would also produce test-embedded blog content like, "how to get hired in 10 easy steps."

But the growth hacking only went so far; over time the results diminished and the company had to continue to crystallize its commercial offerings; it had to get more serious on customers and revenue and outcomes. And this strained the co-founders' ability to all row our ark in the same direction.

And as things became more tenuous, specifically I, well...I would have a heavy hand in how things were to be run.

Which, given my commitments and focus elsewhere, basically meant I acted like a Seagull.

I would swoop in occasionally and shît all over things.

Some might offer this as micro-managing. Others might reflect this as the responsible thing to do for early investors. Call it what you will, but over time, an awkwardness arrived over the second-guessing of decisions made. Mike PK kept building but wasn't sure who to take direction from. Was it Mommy or Daddy? And why were they fighting?

After about two years of my swooping, JFS was surely tired - and our critical co-founder bonds of trust were eroding.

And so - with my Executive Chair hat on, and my seagulling in full force - I came up with a solution.

You see, I'd met someone. Someone who thought was an excellent talent.

Someone who was just leaving a role at another local startup, Runkeeper, and someone who was looking for a new opportunity.

This someone happened to have instigated the development of the Dave Balter Tech Prom. Someone who then helped produce that event with the guile of a ninja. Someone who took no prisoners and who wanted to make her mark.

That someone was Sarah Hodges.

And while we weren't (…dating at the time), it was clear our chemistry was magnetic. And, hell, we needed a marketer. And, well, someone to help JFS succeed.

So the seagull in me figured she would make an absolutely perfect addition to the team.

What in darn hell could possibly go wrong?

(…to be continued)