The study break that became a company

Voices of History started on a study break. During finals week, Josh and I were walking through Butler Library at Columbia, and instead of actually studying we started talking about who we would have dinner with if we could pick anyone from history. He said Nikola Tesla and I said Leonardo da Vinci. It is one of those questions people have been answering at dinner tables forever, mainly because it is safe, since the dinner was never going to happen.

Then we realized that it could happen. With the tech boom of the last few years, all the pieces were finally there to build an accurate digital replica of a person's mind, their brain and their thinking, as long as that person left behind enough of a record to work from. So, rather than study, we got to work.

School of Athens

We called the first version School of Athens, after the Raphael painting that puts great minds from different eras into one conversation. That painting is basically the whole idea: bring people who never lived at the same time into one academic conversation. Our version was rinky dink, a GPT wrapper whose most sophisticated piece of technology was the prompt engineering, with blocky characters we built in three.js. It had two modes, a chat mode where you could talk with a figure and a watch mode where you could watch two of them argue with each other.

We thought we had built a fun game to send to our friends. People kept telling us we had built a company.

We took that first version to a couple of Columbia entrepreneurship events and a design day demo. At one of them we met someone from the AlmaWorks accelerator, who invited us to their demo day, and someone else invited us to a YC happy hour downtown. At both, people told us the same thing: turn this into a company, and sell the technology to consumers, educators, and museums. We had built it as a fun proof of concept, and it had quietly become much more than that.

What it became

So we kept building, and mapped it out across four ways to meet the past. The one we lead with is education, because it is where this matters most. Teachers send us their syllabus and we turn each reading into a guided conversation with the person behind it. The others followed from the same idea: a consumer game for anyone who loves history and debate, exhibits for museums, and a studio for creators. Same standard of accuracy behind every one of them.

The dinner question turned out to be the right one to start with, because it is really a question about access. Almost no one gets to meet the people who built the world we live in. So, that is the distance we are here to close, one conversation at a time.