Exactly 3 years ago tonight, at the party celebrating the end of our http://42.us.org  piscine, I pitched @hashbrown490 on joining @RoamResearch

At the time was just me, a shitty prototype, and 10k from our only user @MeadowsRichard

He said yes.

Happy anniversary Josh!

I went to 42 explicitly to look for a co-founder.

The piscine was designed to break your spirit, you'd spend all day working your ass of, learning without teachers, and if the machine grading you saw linting error you'd get a zero for the day.

Perfect simulation of startup.

The thing that kills startups is founder conflicts.

Had been wandering in the wilderness for close to 5 years looking for the someone I could imagine working with for the rest of my life.

Was living in Mumbai when this tweet brought me back to SF/BA https://twitter.com/paulg/status/847844863727087616?s=20

@paulg's essays had introduced me to LISP, which led me to #clojure and completely changed how I thought about programming.

I figured, if PG met Robert Morris in the lab, might be good environment to meet my cofounder too.

And 42 had free dorms, which extended runway by a lot!

Josh was still to young to drink, but when I went to lab at 3am he was always there, and he would consistently make time to patiently teach me things he'd only learned himself or figured out 2 hours earlier.

Neither of us had experience in C, but I had been building web apps for like 5 years, almost immediately it was clear he was picking up the new material MUCH faster, solving problems MUCH better, and it was NOT close.

The piscine is a month long entrance exam, and it was rough. In our batch nearly 70% of students dropped out.

They said grades didnt matter (if they did I probably wouldn't have gotten in) but much later on we found out that Josh's score was 4th highest in history of US Campus.

When Piscine was done, told Josh that if he taught himself clojure in a month, I'd give him an internship and cover his living expenses till 42 started again.

3 weeks later he was ready to ship features. 3 weeks after that I said, f*ck an internship, want you as my cofounder.

We spent next 3 months sharing a bedroom in a house with 2 kids, taking turns on who had the bed, who slept on floor, working round the clock on roam v2, then v3, v4, v5.

The 2 year old got the idea we were single entity, usually we were only seen together.

"Hey Conorjosh"

Josh told me today, when we started working together, he told himself "I can probably go 4 years without a real living wage, if we don't have any users by then... I'll reassess."

Neither of us expected Roam to take off this fast.

The team is a lot bigger than me and Josh now, and if there is any person responsible for transitioning us from two hackers to a real company it is our first hire, head of HR, PR, Legal, Finance, Ops & Customer Support - Victoria Ledford

Her thread is for another night though.