What Happens At MozFest Doesn’t Stay at MozFest

“We are a child of MozFest,” Jeff Kofman said.

Jeff Kofman is the CEO and co-founder of Trint, a searchable automatic transcription software company. Jeff met his three other co-founders at MozFest 2013 serendipitously. Mark Boas, Mark Panaghiston, and Laurian Gridinoc were three developers with a proof of concept funded by Mozilla and the Knight Foundation, which provides grants for digital journalism projects. The Director of Venture Investments at Knight Foundation, Benoit Wirz, was a friend of Jeff’s and casually introduced Jeff to the team while walking through Ravensbourne in between sessions. “Trint really was born there,” Jeff explained.

A broadcast journalist, Jeff had no expectations for MozFest. He just hoped to meet interesting people and see cool tech projects. He is not a developer, but has a personal curiosity. After 30 years in television reporting, Jeff was vaguely looking for a new opportunity by 2013, but had no intentions of finding it at MozFest. The festival was a last-minute decision to gather information he might include in a university course he was teaching on 21st century journalism.

An effervescent and enthusiastic person, Jeff found all the MozFest projects exciting. But for one in particular, “it was like in a cartoon when a lightbulb goes off over someone’s head,” said Jeff. When Mark, Mark, and Laurian explained their prototype for matching manual transcription to audio, Jeff thought about what might happen if their project could have automated speech and searchable audio. Laurian found the suggestion compelling.

The four MozFest participants kept in touch and the following year, met at a Florentine Airbnb for an intensive work session. Another year would go by before the team, now called Trint, would complete the arduous journey from prototype to product. Trint launched in Sept 2016, now has more than 10,000 users, and raised over three million dollars in May 2017. Besides their innovative software, Trint’s strength is due to the teaming up of different skillsets.

MozFest welcomes participants from a range of experiences and backgrounds for this very purpose: to bring curious people together to tackle a project from different angles. Are you coming to MozFest with a project-in-progress, or even an idea? Add it to Pulse so others can contribute.