An Old Mentor Comes Calling

Part 1 of 6

Momenta
Momenta
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

I met Jason Stirman in 2003 and we became fast friends, bonding over a love of electronic music and wisecracks. While only a few years older, Jason’s wisdom far outpaced mine — being married for several years and parenting a toddler just does that to a man. Jason was studying the nuances of potty training and day care programs, while I was hanging out at popular night spots, bumping oversized bass in my tiny foreign car…precisely the same thing I was doing 7 years prior.

Yeah — there are 15s in that trunk!

I learned a lot from Jason and his prudent, patient approach to life’s trials. Our paths geographically diverged in 2005 when Jason moved to California to help jump start a little company called Twitter, and ultimately this blogging platform I am writing from. I spent the subsequent 10 years involved mostly in turnarounds of struggling manufacturers, but always with an eye to interesting tech startups.

Jason and I had not spoken in a while, but he was always one of those “let’s pick right back up where we left it” kind of guys. So Jason pegged me in December 2014 and he had an idea. “I’d like to use a cool looking plug-in adornment to a headphone jack to harvest power and return a discrete signal. The signal would serve as a key to a special chatroom and enable a safe, secure place for teens to gather. Think you could figure out how to make the electronics work?”

The original idea

The premise was intriguing so I dusted off my old engineering textbooks and found a useful white paper on harvesting energy from a phone. I went into the lab. After hacking through a few prototypes, ultimately we determined that harvesting energy from a headphone jack could work and provide a triggering signal for both an iOS and Android application.

Yeah, those first prototypes may have lacked a little beauty. :)

We talked with an acquaintance of Jason’s who put together the makings of a chat interface and demo application. The concept was christened Dangle — in reference to the power of a dangling icon which would grant access to exciting chat experiences. Both Jason and I were energized by the possiblities of the Dangle system, but knew we were a long way from making a commerical product.

At the same time, another opportunity presented itself to Jason —a chance to birth an unrelated company with a partner he respected for years. As such, Jason left Medium in April 2015 and pitched himself full time into starting Lucid, a mental strength training company for athletes. With Jason’s focus now on another endeavor, the future of Dangle was entirely up to me.

The rest of 2015 brought a major restructuring at work that pushed me into greater levels of responsibility and time commitments. But as 2015 drew to a close, in quieter moments the idea of a valuable physical key bringing people closer together continued to pound at my brain. I made my 2016 New Year’s resolution to determine what that value was.

by Travis Ziebro


Call To Action

Do you believe in a technology experience that allows you total control of your memories? Do you believe that the items you own and wear should be special?

Momenta allows you to store your moments on beautiful heirloom pieces and share them as you choose. Be notified first when Momenta goes to Kickstarter!


Momenta

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Momenta

Life’s moments involve different people at different times. Keep those moments safe, secure & shareable. http://yourmomenta.com

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