ai|inc is now The France Hopper Company

When I started ai in 2007, I knew where I would want the company to go if we lived in an ideal world. But, reality is much different: a much smaller company, and a much smaller target market. I’m actually fine with that. For the last eight years, ai was running in low-gear, and I considered it to be more of a side project than an actual company.

This past Tuesday, that changed. Over the next ten weeks, it will continue to change. For my last term here at Drexel, I’m taking a course called “Launch It!”. It a nutshell, it’s the Close School of Entrepreneurship’s equivalent of Senior Design. However, I expect it to be much more difficult than the actual Senior Design course I’m also enrolled in as the final requirement for graduation.

Why? As I announced to friends on Facebook Tuesday night, the key difference is the goal of the classes. In Senior Design, I’m building an actual product over the course of nine months with an actual team, with the course structured to emulate an actual business project. Launch It! lasts ten weeks, and over the process of those ten weeks, I’m expected to launch an actual company – and in my case – alone. Thankfully, there are several resources available to me as part of the course for support, such as access to mentors and seed funding, both handy resources to have access to when starting a company.

So, for the next ten weeks, I’m kicking ai into high-gear. After eight years of “existing”, it’s time to actually exist.

As of today, ai|inc is now The France Hopper Company.

I decided to change the name after realizing I’m known better on the internet as France Hopper than as the sole employee of a little company called ai. For those of you that never knew I have a company, I’m not surprised, and it’s fair that you didn’t. It’s only existed on the web since 2011. Incidentally, 2011 is when I started this blog, at the same time burying ai as a page called “Company Information” as a child of the “About” page. Now, The France Hopper Company has its own site, and I’d like to invite you to check it out.