Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones (Part 1)

Josh is building a Data Science training company from Alabama. It’s a very interesting model, going deep into high school level skill development in what the market needs today.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Josh. It’s great to have you. Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Josh Jones: It’s great to be on the program with you. I’m originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the southeastern US. I spent a good deal of my life there until my teenage years. I started a software company in Central and South America. I spent about ten years traveling back and forth between the southern US and Latin America. Later in life, I ended up in Japan and Southeast Asia for a handful of years. I’ve been in Birmingham, Alabama for the last 15 years.

Sramana Mitra: You did your schooling in Alabama as well?

Josh Jones: So, it’s a little bit of a story, but I dropped out of high school when I was 16. The software company I had started was running pretty well and was taking me to a number of different countries. There was a lot of travel.

Sramana Mitra: What was the software company that you started? Tell me a bit more.

Josh Jones: Well, in the late nineties back in the days of dial-up, in Latin America and many parts of the developing world, if you wanted an internet connection, you had to have a phone first. And to get a phone might take two or three years on a waiting list in a lot of these countries.

So, people would go to internet cafes and pay by the hour to use a computer. Many of these internet cafes just popped up like mushrooms after rain – just everywhere. There was really no good way of managing the user interactions. People were using a legal pad to log people in, log people out, and calculate their rates and their fees. I wrote software in Spanish to manage these internet cafes and keep track.

Sramana Mitra: How did you come up on that idea? What is your relationship with Latin America?

Josh Jones: Well, I went to language school in Antigua, Guatemala and spent the summer of my 15th year there. I was going to internet cafes to check my email. I noticed that the internet cafe that I frequented had three floors and thirty computers with people coming and going all the time. There was a lot of inefficiency in the way that they were keeping track of things. I saw them proverbially pulling their hair out.

So, I decided to write software for them. As a 15-year-old, I didn’t know much about business, but I said, “Hey, I can write some software for you.” We wrote it; it worked well. And then one of the internet cafes down the street tried to steal the software. We found out about it, and I realized that this is worth something. That led to me leaving high school and moving back there. I bought a laptop and rewrote the software to sell it. This was back in the day of floppy disks. So I was deploying it on 3.5 inch floppy drives in about eight countries in Central America, from the US down to Panama and then ultimately jumped over into South America.

Sramana Mitra: How big did that business become?

Josh Jones: I had customers in a number of countries. It was never really a unicorn or any major exit or anything like that.

Sramana Mitra: For a 15-year-old building a business, it’s a phenomenal learning experience.

Josh Jones: Yes, I learned a lot. This was before Agile and all this stuff. So, I’d take it to an internet cafe and try and sell it. If they say no, I’d ask why not. Then I would go back, spend a week writing whatever feature it was, then essentially deploy to some more floppy disks, show back up, and either sell it or move on.

Sramana Mitra: How much were you selling the software for?

Josh Jones: It was probably a few hundred dollars for license at the time for an internet cafe. Back then, we’d selling one version, say version two. Then if you want version three, you’ve to pay more for it. It was really before we had SaaS subscriptions and that sort of thing.

Sramana Mitra: This went on for how long?

Josh Jones: To give you the broader context, no one in my family had gone to college at that point. I came back and told my parents that I want to pursue business full-time. I wasn’t really learning a lot at school then. I think they were concerned that if I dropped out and just moved to Central South America, I would eventually regret not having the credentials and the college experience.

So the negotiation we sort of landed on was that I’ll figure out a way to get into college if they let me drop out of high school. They agreed to that. I was able to start taking courses at the University of Alabama, and ultimately enrolled there under their early enrollment program. Since I was traveling back and forth between Central and South America, it took me about seven years to get my undergrad degree, but ultimately I got a degree in business management. Then ten years after that, I came back and did an executive MBA at Emory.

I’m happy to double click on any of this, but just to give you the broader picture. After that software company, I ended up getting distracted with college and losing interest in it. I then started an IT consulting company. We sold that after a year. I next started a web design firm. We sold that after seven years. I ended up starting an English school and sold that after a couple of years. I came back, started a data science and AI firm and sold that after seven years. Now, I’m on the next iteration.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a High-Impact EdTech Venture from Alabama: QuantHub CEO Josh Jones
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