Brent is a first generation American and his parents immigrated to the states after WW2. He spent a lot of his childhood playing with electronics. During high school, he practically took over the computer lab in the mid 80’s to code and tinker however he liked. He went to college to get a Computer Science degree and worked for Microsoft after graduating. He then moved over to GE Capital to do software support for them. At this point, he discovered Autocross and fell in love immediately!
He ended up buying an MR2 to race and wanted to turbo charge it. The MegaSquirt was available to control fuel but could not do ignition advance. So, he took it upon himself to build a controller himself and called it the Mega Jolt. He used the archaic Yahoo mailing list to post up about his idea and began selling them very quickly. To help ramp p production, he began purchasing electronic assembly equipment and installing them in the garage.
They eventually moved out of the garage to a real commercial space to house all of their equipment and parts. While working on their next project, the Race Capture Pro data acquisition system, they utilized a crowd-funding service called IndieGoGo to raise funds. After the success of this first campaign, they decided to do it again for their RaceCapture Track which was more affordable for the weekend enthusiast.
To continue to expand their offerings, they changed the product line name to Podium and began to offer live telemetry data that can be streamed over the cellular network. Their Podium Connect system allows you to transmit existing data acquisition system information back to the pits (and anywhere else) so that others can monitor your car.