which could learn and adapt from what they were
doing. The board voted unanimously to give him whatever support he
needed.
Jada
resigned from her school teaching position a few months after selling
the house. There was no point staying in Mississippi after her
parents had passed on. She thought about what to do next and decided
to go north. Not back to Ohio, where she had started college, but
over to Pennsylvania where she wanted to try and be accepted into one
of the prestigious scientific institutes which were located there.
She had her eye on Carnegie Mellon, but didn’t know if it was
the right place for her. She would travel to Pittsburgh, find a place
to live and start the application process. There was nothing to be
gained by staying in Mississippi. With the money from the sale of the
house, she was able to pay-off what remained of the education loans.
She had decided against going into debt if she would aim for a
scientific degree.
David
found his company a hot item after years of struggling along.
Suddenly, he was getting calls from prospective investors and media
figures wanting to know how his geek dating site had become all the
rage. In truth, he had no idea what had happened. Somehow the site
had been picked up by one engineer, who showed it to another and then
the whole IT industry knew about it. The key factor seemed to be men
actually finding women to who would go out with them. Most of the
other sites excluded eighty percent of the men using them and the top
twenty had their pick of the women signing up. In a strange way,
their site had found a way around it.
Jada
arrive in Pittsburgh when it was cold, in the depths of the winter.
She found a motel room where she could stay until she had a place to
rent permanently. The city was bustling and located on the banks of
the river. She loved the hills around the city and the buildings
inside it. But she needed income and a way to start the school
application process. Becoming a teacher in Pennsylvania was not easy
and involved taking a battery of expensive tests if you transferred
in from another state. She lacked the time and money to do that. She
spent her days searching on line for jobs she felt she could do. And
at long last Jada focused in on an area she had some experience:
dance.
David
decided if one dating website could do well, maybe another could do
even better. He bought a company which specialized in dating to the
health care community. The focus was not totally dissimilar. He did
not publicly let it be known he was buying the site until after a few
weeks had passed so they could figure out whether or not the same
methods would work for it. Two weeks into the transition, the site
took off again and became highly successful. Lighting had struck
twice in the same place and David realized he had a winning
combination of programming and audience which could make him rich
beyond imagination.
Jada
found a job teaching dance to suburban kids outside Pittsburgh. It
took her a few weeks to locate a small dance studio where the young
kids would show up in the evening, change into their dance clothes
and learn the basic steps. Her gymnastic coach background helped and
soon she was teaching at a small store-front dance school. It was a
change from the loud and obnoxious high school students she had been
dealing with. Meanwhile, she struggled to find a decent place to live
in the city with a safe neighborhood. She was working to begin the
application process on line, but was determined to obtain an advanced
degree in a scientific field.
The
process of taking over most of the online dating market had begun
slowly, but cascaded as David’s company started applying what
they’d learned to other markets in the on line dating field.
Within two years, they had applied everything to the new sites they
had put up on the internet and we soon worth millions of dollars. The
pace of growth was astronomical. David had to move the company
headquarters. They moved all the