cant sleep gardentech timeline with no years involved (i will do those later)
- Mark Gardner and Elijah Hierro are relatively close friends in college (Gardner is studying business, Hierro is studying computer engineering). they both graduate and immediately lose contact with each other because they didnt really care that much about it at the time.
- Gardner gets a job at an investment firm (boring), Hierro works retail part-time while working on software to try and make something out of his degree and gets extremely fixated on artificial intelligence (to be clear: this is a special interest).
- they end up meeting again by chance while Hierro is looking for investors for a groundbreaking product he's developing. they hit it off even stronger than they did in college and end up spending nearly all their free time with each other (aww. budding codependency. so cute)
- Gardner is like "Dude. Our jobs kind of suck ass. You are so smart and good at computers. We should found a company" and Hierro is like "Ok :-)" and they make Garden Technologies together (commonly shortened to GardenTech). this was hierro's idea. Gardner wanted to at the very least combine their names, but Hierro is very firm in the belief that Gardner's name will be more marketable & Hierro hates being the face of anything anyway.
- GardenTech releases its first product, a remarkably intelligent cleaning robot named Spiffy, to unprecedented success. like "no one has seen this sort of thing before" levels of success. Gardner cuts his hair short (to Hierro's only-slightly-exaggerated grief) to seem more professional at business meetings with potential investors, and Hierro extremely reluctantly takes one or two interviews about his working process.
- Hierro starts experimenting with a humanlike AI program along with designing some security software for home computers to release under the GardenTech name. Gardner thinks he could use some time to slack off, but Hierro insists that the AI project is him slacking off.
- as GardenTech grows in size & employee count, more and more calls start coming in needing help with their software & hardware. Hierro's AI project is going extremely well, and he realizes what he can use it for. CAM is conceptualized and its work training begins promptly with a lot of help from Gardner to make sure it's actually customer service ready.
