Michael Hartl

About Michael Hartl

I grew up in Southern California, taking for granted that sometimes the February weather makes wearing shorts a necessity. I then headed east for college, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard University (which, somewhat confusingly, means that I attended Harvard College). I lived in the house formerly known as North, and I worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. During the summer, I SURFed at the California Institute of Technology.

After college, I spent a year studying chaos theory at the University of Maryland, and then I returned to Caltech to get a Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics. I became interested in business and entrepreneurship in graduate school, so after finishing my degree I spent a year splitting my time between postdoctoral research and starting a company with my long-time friend Sumit Daftuar (also of Harvard and Caltech).

The company Sumit and I started, Quark Sports, applied our strong quantitative and computer skills to create (of all things) unique weekly fantasy sports games in football, basketball, and baseball. In the year following my postdoc, I worked full-time developing the Quark Sports website, as well as creating BracketManager, the leading independent NCAA Basketball Tournament site. During this time I also served as an editor for The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive and Extended Edition, an update to the all-time best-selling physics lectures.

Quark Sports successfully built a core of enthusiastic and loyal customers, but our need for additional funding, combined with the risky legal environment created by litigious players unions, led to our decision to shut down in 2005. I then spent the better part of a year writing a book with Aurelius Prochazka called RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails, available in stores now. These days I'm living in Silicon Valley working on a new startup. Future updates as events warrant. :-)