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’ll tell you about in my next post.