The summer that started everything

Working from home while the weather is so beautiful (the weather’s been amazing the past few days here in London — feels like God is taunting the British population) has reminded me of that one summer when I was 15 or 16.

Dante and I had started our company Scholica a few weeks prior, and we had just signed a contract with our high school’s board to start providing them with our E-learning platform sometime towards the end of autumn. We had been working on it for a few months by that time, and it was finally starting to take shape.

About a week or so before summer break, we had a meeting with the headmaster, in which he explained that they had ended their contract with the company that had previously been providing them with those online learning tools, and he asked us if it was possible to start using our system right at the start of the new school year. We obviously said yes straight away, because we couldn’t wait for our classmates and teachers to start using our tools.

That meant we had to not just finish our system sooner than we were planning to, but it also meant that we had to create teacher’s manuals and documentation for the school’s staff before the end of that 6-week break.

It also meant that we got to send the school an invoice for a full year of usage of our platform for its 1500+ students and…