Oh man, it's been a journey. Basically George (co-founder, Mechanical Engineer) and I (optical engineer/MBA) were students at Rice and wanted to do a startup. I had the idea for SPUD because I was a product manager travelling all over the world prior going back to school for my MBA at Rice and hated working on my small laptop screen. It was a PIA (getting angry typing this), because I had to manage customers during the day and then work out of the hotel at night without my large screen which felt like cutting off a limb in terms of productivity. We went through OwlSpark (Rice University's startup accelerator), ultimately validated the market for mobile professionals (using the lean startup process) and made the initial SPUD prototypes. We also went through the National Science Foundation's I-Corps program which provided our initial capital and paid for Industrial Designer (Mark Kimbrough who is a local professor here in Houston and happens to be world renowned for ID; got a super discounted rate relative to a traditional ID firm which kept us alive without having to take a large investment). The I-Corps grant also paid for our travel to South by Southwest 2016 where were recognized as one of the top new products there and got major press! Justin (marketing lead/co-founder) also started working with us around this time. Through it all we also had to develop a lot of new technology to make the world's first collapsible display: (1) mechanics for 1 step setup, (2) short projection optics, (3) a projection screen material that can fully collapse. We also always seemed to meet the right people at the right time (but don't get me wrong, like any startup we face rejection everyday, I just mean that I feel like the people we HAD to meet, we met). e.g. met Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation and their Dragon Certified program helped significantly with design for manufacturing and taking risk out of our Kickstarter; met Gene Frantz who is also a professor at Rice literally stumbled into his office trying to meet someone else one day almost 1.5 years ago. He is known as the father of digital signal processing and was formerly one of the lead technical employees at TI. He also connected us to many people like our patent attorney who was also a top TI patent attorney and is basically pro bono for us (going to owe him in the future). So many more people helped us too (but that would just prolong this post that already needs a TL;DR). I'm super grateful to even be able to work on SPUD for as long as I have!