Spines: an awesome journey has started

“After more than a year, I can’t believe we are doing this”

This is a very recurring thought I’m having these days. I started a company and we are building software to deal with a very important topic for me, learning. I’ve always been very curious and luckily enough I had the opportunity to attend many different classes such as biology and other basic sciences, computer science, philosophy, psychology, design, economics, and music. Now you can do this any weekend on the Internet, but not many years ago you could only get this by attending a University. It was a great time, and coming from a little town in Patagonia, it revolutionized me. All those lectures, seminars, laboratories, girls, a real library, concerts, and more girls. I loved attending any class when possible, just for the fun of it. Some years later my opinion on education changed. I was disappointed with formal education, the way examination worked, and struggling through a huge economic crisis, I dropped everything and traveled to Spain. Since then, I’ve never quit studying on my own. I’ve taught myself many things, but specially I learned fundamentals of programming, and I’ve been working as a web developer for a decade or so.

I think learning is the most important activity of a person, and this is because of several reasons. In its most fundamental form, learning is what determines the adaptation of biological organisms to a dynamic environment (with high uncertainty). That is to say, we survive because we learn. Moreover learning changes you, not only physically through neurons connections but also changes the representation that you have of yourself. But most commonly I think about learning like fuel of life, it’s very often compared with an adventure, and I certainly feel it this way. It requires effort, dedication, discipline, but it can be a lot of fun.

I love learning new things, and it’s a great time for that. There is so much knowledge out there, all kind of information, documents, videos, audios. That’s amazing, only it’s not true. There are loads of information, but that is not knowledge. It’s great that we can access all that information easier and easier each time, but for this information to change us, and allow us to create new things and new ideas, we need to digest this information. I don’t say we need to remember everything, though memory is very important, learning is not the same as memorizing.

Don’t you feel that you consume (read, watch and listen) more valuable information but you learn less? I do, and I found that many people feel this way. I think it’s a great problem to solve, so I spent last year with my partner Enrique Echenique, creating this company. Thanks to him we get the funding we had calculated for the project. We called the company LihuenHub, which means “light, or dawn - hub”(mapuche). We built a great team, and we finally started working on the project. I’ll talk about all of this soon, specially about the team and how we are working.

I’m very happy with our progress, and we have a great opportunity in front of us. I know we will do something worthy.

If you are interested in this topic and want to help us build it, please visit spines.me and subscribe to our newsletter.

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