Weeds, while hated, flourish

In December, I made a big move. I quit my job to work full time on a startup.

My friends and family are tired of hearing it by now, but I have yet to share my personal experience with the world wide web.

During my senior design project at Georgia Tech, I paid close attention to other groups' projects. Four of them were related to medicine- which surprised me, since it seems like a tough space for developers with ideas. Come presentation day, I saw why- they all shared a passionate mentor from Emory.

A year and a half later, I found myself on a call with that mentor- neurosurgeon David LaBorde- and a friend and fellow developer, Corbin Pon. We all came together to brainstorm projects around Emory that Corbin and I could join or start, with David advising. We put together quite a list. Before we ended the call, David mentioned a bigger issue he faced that might be outside our scope, but that might interest us.

He told us that it was difficult to find the right research collaborators in academia.

This problem stuck with us. We began looking into how research was done, and the tools researchers use. We realized that academia has a huge information advantage over other sectors- a rigorous, open citation network. If we could find a way to leverage this network, we felt we could solve David's problem- and a few others, to boot.

We played with the idea a bunch, came up with a name, and got an awesome designer. Scholrly was born.

At Scholrly, we're building a social search engine for academics. Our value proposition to researchers is simple- we will help you find papers and people you care about.

How? By leveraging your position in your field, we know what's relevant to you. By providing relevant researchers alongside their research, we make it easier to find collaborators. By allowing you to choose a search "mentor", we help you jumpstart your search. And by focusing first on depth, and then on breadth, we avoid becoming another shallow search service.

Why am I so interested? In my experience, the academic community is under-served . I don't mean that there isn't enough grant money- though there may not be- or that academics aren't paid well enough- though that might be the case. I mean that, for whatever reason, the tools academics use daily suck.

The community isn't being served, so they build their own tools. And while many of these tools are technically sound, and make a lot of sense, very few of them are a joy to use. We want to change this- to delight- to drastically improve the work experiences of research professionals- the people that drive discovery. And that is something I'm happy to leave a job for.