Jason Roberts Origin Story

What do Jeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, and a 6'7", 350lb mountain man who collaborated with John Conway have in common? They're part of Jason Roberts's origin story, shared for the first time.

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What do Jeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, and a 6’7”, 350lb mountain man who collaborated with John Conway have in common?

They’re part of Jason Roberts’s origin story, shared here for the first time.

If you know the Math Academy story—8th graders crushing AP Calc BC—this is the prequel.

Some highlights from the 50-minute podcast:

• Jason went to high school with Jeff Dean (yes, that Jeff Dean). Both were mentored by Steve Sigur, their school's basketball coach -- a 6-foot-7, 350-pound mountain-man, who also happened to be a brilliant physicist with a knack for spotting and cultivating technical talent in students.
• Steve was likely the first person to make the uncanny observation that "Jeff doesn't write bugs," decades before the Chuck-Norris-style Jeff Dean Facts became internet lore. He was also collaborating with mathematician John Conway on a book, which was put on hold following Steve's passing in 2008.
• In the 90s, Jason was building high-frequency trading systems before "high-frequency trading" was even a term. He later coined the phrase "luck surface area" and lived it.
• In 2010, Travis Kalanick called him and said, "I started this thing called UberCab, and you’re the CTO." This was back when Uber was literally two cars driving around San Francisco -- so early that Jason didn't want to "work for some cab company" 😂 and offered to consult instead.
• Curtis Chambers would fly down from SF and stay at Jason's condo in Pasadena while they rearchitected Uber's real-time dispatch system, making it so unbelievably fast that people initially thought it was broken.
• Jason ultimately walked away with enough capital to fund years of Math Academy content development. But Math Academy itself began almost accidentally, as yet another instance of luck surface area.
• It started when Jason and his wife Sandy were "voluntold" to coach their son’s 4th-grade math field day team, which went so well that they continued through the next year as a pull-out class. By 5th grade, students were covering advanced algebra and even some calculus, and the incredible results caught the attention of the district superintendent, leading to an official pilot.
• The Math Academy program expanded to a number of classes and was recognized by the Washington Post as America's most accelerated math program, taking 6th graders from basic arithmetic to passing the AP Calculus BC in 8th grade, followed by university math with PhD instructors in high school.
• Jason built software to help him teach the classes effectively, and as the school program grew, so did the capabilities of the software. By the first fully remote school year of the pandemic, the Math Academy system outperformed conventional remote instruction. By the following year, it was even more effective than the original in-person model.
• While schools across the world faced pandemic-related learning loss, Math Academy's students learned more then ever before. AP Calculus BC scores skyrocketed, with most students passing the exam and most students who passed receiving the maximum score possible (5 out of 5).

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