Co-Founders and Married: The Brisq Founder Story
What are the chances that the person who could be your best friend in life grew up next to you? We believe it is pretty slim. It doesn’t mean you have bad neighbors, but there is a whole wide world of people that could lead to great lifelong friendships. Across the street or on the other side of the world, you may be missing true friendships, interesting chats, new penpals, or amazing stories.
We are Tina and Nathan, the founders of Brisq. While we are both computer scientists, we did not know each other until we both touched down in Prague, Czech Republic for graduate school for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We both pursued a European Union grant program (Marie Curie). 10,358 miles (between Indonesia and US) separated us, but a common interest in NLP and a love of travel had us meeting in Prague.
Did we tell you that we are married? Yes, we are married (Woooott!), but we are not like most married couples. While others decorate their houses with art, we have walls of white boards for Brisq’s future mega-plans! Being married in a start-up redefines “all-in”; there is no backup. Much like our marriage, we are fully committed and believe 100% in what we are doing. Being married, we work together very well, know when the other needs recharging time, and know when and where the other is most productive. People often say it is like they are married to their co-founder, we are scientists and take things very literal. Other couples may bond by running or kayaking together, we hack the night away.
Between the two of us, we have lived all over the world, in Indonesia, USA, Czech Republic, Italy, Latvia, and Iceland through a Fulbright fellowship, an Erasmus Mundus scholarship, and Marie Curie grants. In all those locations, we made life long friends and each experience made us who we are today. Not everyone gets these opportunities in life. We were lucky that our research took us on our international routes, but only a small percentage of the world gets to fulfill their dreams of international travel.
Before going to each country, we would try to find out as much information about life in the country as possible. Sometimes we got this information from friends who have travelled there before, or that we met in our travels, and sometimes from friends and penpals we met in the old days of mIRC and ICQ. If we were able to keep life long friends from the 90’s that we met online, why does everyone want a hyper-local culture? Turns out, there wasn’t a very good solution out there for the alternative. We knew we had a model that worked for us, both in marriage and friendship, we just needed to make it virtual so others could have access to experiences and people from around the world. These connections might just turn out to be a lifelong friend that you can always have a great conversation with and maybe if you are lucky, your future startup co-founder.
This is why we came up with Brisq. We want others to find their best connections in life, not only near where they are now, but also from around the world. Brisq allows you to connect to people you don’t know yet. People can only connect once they both pass each other’s quiz that they create. In this way, people can define their views, values, and what they hold most dear in their life in a set of questions and answers. This is used as a vouching system to make sure you do hold something in common with those that you connect to.
We want to help you make actual friends, someone that you like to hangout with. Not like other social networks that focus on extending your current list of friends and are highly location based. Brisq allows you to find people near you but the focus is on finding friends from around the world.
Using our own married life, experience traveling, and life long friends as a basis, we set out to create a system, based on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, which could filter down the vastness of users to come up with the best possible connections. Using various in-house NLP models, we have created our main differentiator. A system that can map your personality, habits, values, and traits to find you interesting connections around the world, using your own words, your own way, and not a lengthy questionnaire.
So far, we are happy that we got good feedback and reviews from our users. We hope you enjoy Brisq as much as we enjoy building it. Meet us at DC TechDay on October 6th!
Check us out at brisqapp.com
Brisq is available at Google Play Store.