Lernabit is a company that was born out of a personal need. Although it was formally established as a business in 2020, its story began long before.
The story begins when I was in college. As it is for many people, college for me was a period of exciting self-discovery. I have always been a geek who loves learning, curiosity, and free thought. So naturally, my years in college were some of the most exciting in my life.
I initially planned on attending graduate school to get an advanced degree, and then eventually move into research or academia. However, after considering the rising cost of tuition, I decided that attending graduate school wasn't the wisest economic decision. With the benefit of hindsight, I now realize that was a smart move, but it was a tough choice to make at the time.
Almost immediately after I entered the real world, I began to miss the halls of academia. I have always loved learning and continued to learn new things at every opportunity, but something was missing. Outside of the formal education environment, it started to occur to me that there aren't any good tools for adults to learn on their own. There are a lot of great educational tools for kids and plenty of thought-provoking content for adults, but there aren't any good tools to help lifelong learners remember and understand what they learn. That's why I built Lernabit.
My mission for Lernabit is to create innovative new tools that empower thinkers, creators, and explorers to continue expanding their minds through all stages of life. But that stated mission is not just a sales pitch. The spirit of continuous learning, relentless innovation, and unstoppable persistence has been baked into the company from day one.
Unlike most tech startups, Lernabit was not built in Silicon Valley. I was born and raised in southwest Ohio in a town without venture capital funding or an endless supply of programmers. It is, in every respect, a seemingly impossible location from which I could launch a tech startup. But one of the things I have learned on this journey is that sometimes great things emerge when necessity clashes with the impossible.
Without access to funding, tech talent, or even a network of entrepreneurs to help me, I was starting from zero. But I believed so strongly in my vision that I continued forward. I learned computer programming and built the initial version of Lernabit myself. I then started using it to learn additional skills as the need came up, such as entrepreneurship, programming, and graphic design. To this day, I use Lernabit as an essential tool to help me continue building the company.
The experience has taught me that the things that seemed like disadvantages for a tech startup have turned out to be some of the greatest strengths. It forced me to put my own product to the test in real-world scenarios. But it also helped me build a company that is free from the Silicon Valley echo chamber. When tech startups accept venture capital money, the investors demand a return on their investment. The usual result is that the company begins grasping for revenue and market share, usually by selling personal data collected from their users. Without any outside investors, this has never been a problem for Lernabit. Instead, while many bright people in The Valley were finding new and clever ways to harvest personal data that could be sold for profit, I was forced to build a product that would solve a real problem.
Today, Lernabit is still based in southwest Ohio and has never accepted venture capital money. It is a for-profit company, but it is one that I intend to build in the interest of people and for the betterment of humanity, without the negative influence of investors whose only interest is profit. That independence has allowed Lernabit to operate in a spirit of free thought and open-mindedness and to stay focused on our mission. That mission might be more critical now than at any point in history.
We are facing a future fraught with many challenges, including climate change, misinformation, and failing democratic systems. We also must balance the promise and peril of new technologies like AI and genetic technology. Solving these challenges might seem impossible, but it must be done because the cost of failure would be catastrophic. The seemingly impossible task of finding solutions to these problems will clash with the necessity to do it.
No single person or even a single company can solve all of these challenges. But if we study the threats that have faced humanity in the past, as well as the most significant inventions and discoveries throughout time and across different cultures, a common thread begins to emerge. In virtually every case, knowledge was the force multiplier that empowered people to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles. My vision for Lernabit is to create that same effect at a massive scale by encouraging a culture that appreciates free thought, critical thinking, and rationality.
I believe that most people are more intelligent than they realize and that the world is full of untapped brain power waiting to be shared. So I invite you to join me on this mission to create a new culture that appreciates the power of knowledge to solve our most pressing problems. If we can unlock the full range of intelligence that lies within us all, then, together, we can take humanity in a new and positive direction.
Aaron Wright
Founder