Learn how Will Jessup’s entrepreneurial spirit and love of innovation led to the birth of TheoremOne.
Picture this: A group of programmers in their mid-20s, drawing up ideas on a whiteboard and eating pizza in a Southern California home filled with IKEA furniture. Like many leading tech companies, these were the early days of TheoremOne.
Will Jessup’s path to founding TheoremOne was paved with an entrepreneurial spirit. He created his first company, a video game review website, in college. The second company Will co-founded — a website with user-generated content about celebrities — landed him right in the middle of the web 2.0 boom. Seizing on the Ruby on Rails phenomenon, Will launched Citrusbyte, which would later become known as TheoremOne.
To him, it was a great adventure. “I was out there networking like crazy and hiring people,” said Will. Recruiting talent from Los Angeles, to Arizona, to China, he quickly built a technology team and began tackling large scale software engineering projects.
Networking is a hallmark of Will’s entrepreneurial journey. An avid video and board game player, he is not someone who operates in “easy mode.”
“We had to be really scrappy, to get people together and put our first work out there. Everything is based on your brand and your reputation. If you don’t have one, you’re not going to get business. You’ve got to keep hitting it out of the park to get the next job and the next job after that.”
In the process of networking, Will met Brady Brim-DeForest, who would become a partner in TheoremOne and later CEO. The two spent a week one summer brainstorming wacky ideas on numerous whiteboards and putting their vision for TheoremOne together.
Of every achievement TheoremOne has attained in the past 13 years, Will is most proud of this culture of empowerment.
The company has come a very long way from what Will described as the “hacker culture house.” Today, he operates alongside Brady and a team of other leaders, challenging their team of engineers and strategists to find innovative solutions to the thorniest problems.
For Will, it’s vital to stay curious and challenge ideas — and have his challenged in return. “When people see, ‘Wow, I can challenge things around here. I have a voice that matters.’ All of a sudden, they’re invested.”
Of every achievement TheoremOne has attained in the past 13 years, Will is most proud of this culture of empowerment. He loves seeing the business continue to grow and evolve — developing strong leaders, acquiring the top talent, and delivering fresh, novel software solutions to clients.
