Sophomore year at Brown, we were thrown together as roommates. We stayed up late talking about math, teaching, and the tools we wished we had had in high school. The first prototype came out of those conversations.

We spent the next summer building a learning platform for college calculus at Brown. It was rough, but it taught us how hard it is to teach math well on a screen — and how much room there was to do it better.

Brown's B-Lab accelerator took us in for the summer. We chose IB Math: James had grown up inside the curriculum, and we both felt it deserved much better materials than existed.

We graduated, raised a small amount of funding, and started on Perplex full-time. Almost everything we thought we knew about content, pedagogy, and software got rebuilt that first year out of school.

We packed up and moved to San Francisco — to be among the people doing the most serious work in software, and to give what we are building the time and focus it deserves.