Authoring Tools and MLGuru.ai as the Start of Lupo.ai

Authoring Tools and MLGuru.ai as the Start of Lupo.ai

Every story has a start, but in many cases we never get to hear where it all began as we usually hear about the high points, low points, or the end.

Today I want to tell you the story of how I cofounded Lupo.ai, a company that has a vision on making education-creation accessible to everyone.

In case I haven’t told you, our dream is to democratize knowledge transfer through video, by removing technical and linguistic barriers.

Ok, that was a little bit too much “adult speak”. In fewer words, what we want to do is to make the process of creating and producing video training easy and accessible to everyone—and I can confidently say that it feels like we are moving in the right direction.

Anyway, to the “how it started”, starting with how I got into the world of learning and development.

In 2002, I got started developing training for adopting this new thing called .NET as I was working for a company called Artinsoft (ARTificial INtelligence SOFTware) who created the migrators from VB6 to VB.NET. Then I was a training developer in Microsoft’s Route 64 initiative, which was a collaboration with Intel and HP to move pretty much the entire world from 32-bit computing to 64-bit. This was then followed by authoring at Pluralsight, curriculum development at Cloudera as well as other training-related projects.

The point of this story is that sometime around 2015 I started creating tools for automating parts of the training-creation process for Pluralsight and Cloudera.

If you are a software developer, you know how this works. You automate one process, so you can move into a more interesting one that adds more value, then you automate this process too, and keep building on top.

Well, turns out I had automated so many processes that we only had to add a couple of things to make it a full video publishing platform.

So… we did.

My small startup had 3 developers, so we did the most natural thing… a competition.

I told each one of them to pick a programming language and using all the available code that we had, the first one to build a content publishing platform would get “a beer and all the programming cred in the world”.

Python and .NET entered the competition, and at the end we had a winner… and Lupo was born.

We built the base of a content publishing system or CPS, as I call it. We created a platform for developing training in a standardized, collaborative, effective, and cost efficient way.

It was not yet called Lupo though. The friendly name of the project was “Course Creator Service”, but it started as MLGuru Inc which is what I am going to tell you about tomorrow.