MATTHEW GILSON

Sharendipity

Mark Gehring (lower right), CEO of the three-employee, Madison (Wis.)-based company, which develops tools that allows nontechies to create their own software:

I had two daughters who were learning different levels of algebra in school. But they were learning in a way that was more about memorizing equations rather than understanding the underlying concepts. So we said, "Can we make an algebra workbench, a set of tools to learn math, that would be directed at parents and students and that would be developed by that community?"

But we knew that was a niche market. We started to think, "What if we make a more general platform that lets people in math run with that and lets people in physics do their own thing?" Why don't we change the way software is developed—which is a huge idea. And that was one of our goals—to come up with a big idea, one that was really important.

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