My car was totaled

After a terrible accident in my first car (you were good to me, Carolla 😢), I was in a terrible position as a senior in high school—I was unable to leave my house whenever I wanted. As a result, my high school buddy, Chris, ended up being the person who would pick me up most often so we could go hang out together and with our other friends at the time.

One night, while cruising around the streets of Phoenix in his car, we agreed that our city was a terrible place for teenagers with absolutely nothing to do. But then, in a quick flash, I said something to the effect of, “That can’t be true. There has to be something to do—we just don’t know about it.”

Thus catalyzed our joint mission to create a website (in the height of the dotcom bubble, I might add) that would help teenagers around town identify what there was to do, TeenGenesis.com. If you can handle the cheesy truth, our tagline was: “Get a clue. Get a life. Get it here.”

We had a ton of fun ideas for the thing, and we even got it working decently. Chris built something that would allow me to add information about local establishments and upload those to the site for other local teenagers to browse and learn about. It was like Yelp for teenagers—only 5 years before Yelp existed.

We even had a “Create-a-Date” wizard that allowed you to build a progressive date idea based on whatever you were looking for or interested in with your boyfriend or girlfriend. The idea had enough interest that we established a partnership with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (M.A.D.D.) in their effort to discourage underage drinking. I vaguely remember being advertised on Domino’s pizza boxes around the valley.

After many months of working on the project together, I eventually got another car, and we both started college at ASU. In short, we got busy, and our priority for the thing kind of faded away. But it was a start. More importantly, it later led to our partnership on Judge-O-Rama and, eventually, blippr.

As the tagline had encouraged (under our very 90’s logo), I’m not sure we found our lives there, but we sure did get more of a clue about what starting something would take. Thus began the days of my software entrepreneurship.