Origin Story

In 1980, Our Founder* locked himself in the linen closet of his mother’s small, midwestern home with just seven items:

  • a handheld Mattel football game

  • one of the first computerized chess games from Radio Shack

  • an 8-bit home computer called the Commodore VIC-20

  • a flashlight

  • a soldering kit

  • a fresh pack of Bubble Yum

  • a 704-page volume of the Guiness Book of World Records

It’s unclear the length of time he spent in that particular closet but it was long enough to motivate this imaginative teenager to create the world’s first Greatness Machine™: A computer engine so powerful it could accurately identify greatness across any topic or category. After many failed attempts at building the ambitious prototype, Our Founder decided to throw in the towel on his lifelong dream.

Original Sketch of Prototype

But true passion never dies. Upon hearing two men have a heated exchange about who was the NBA GOAT (Greatest of All Time), Our Founder knew he had to finish what he started. He thought “why are these two men arguing only about Lebron James vs Michael Jordan?” In his view, the sports media had intentionally narrowed down the GOAT debate down to just two Hall of Fame talents as they pursued increased ratings, clicks, and ad revenue. But what about Russell? What about Kareem? What about Kobe? What about Wilt? Data and facts had been superseded by hyperbole, bluster, and recency bias.

After thousands of hours of working on the Greatness Machine’s extensive modeling, Our Founder knew that in order to combat bouts of cognitive biases and accidental crownings of greatness, he needed to refine his world-class predictive software. This came about by applying a better process to what he initially developed in 1980. As it turns out, the exact same process he wound up using for the Greatness Machine’s intelligence engine was one he learned from taking Driver’s Ed as a 14-year-old. It’s called IPDE (pronounced Ip-Dee).

Identify > Predict > Decide > Execute.

Following this continuum is paramount for measuring and extrapolating data well beyond sports and can be deployed in many areas of decision-making. When applied proficiently, the IPDE continuum can help avoid inaccurate results. It can also help the engine become a better predictor of greatness. The more the robust quantitative and qualitative analysis became, the stronger and more accurate the Greatness Machine’s intelligence engine became. Indubitably, if one can’t measure data one simply can’t compare or rank it either.

“When it comes to approaching complex concepts like the overall greatness of a person or thing, which are usually a composite of multiple dimensions, it is important to breakdown the high-level concept into lower-level ones and try to identify those first before jumping straight into specific attributes and metrics.”
— Our Founder

During a very secretive demo in the fall of 2022 before respected members of the AI community, the Greatness Machine™ impressed by identifying and examining key data sets across a wide range of typical and atypical topics. This was a seismic event for the development community as this breakthrough led to even more innovative and groundbreaking approaches to data analysis.

After a successful soft and private launch in 2024, Our Founder decided to release a pop culture-specific version of the Greatness Machine™ (the underlying technology behind MountRushmoreOf.com) as a licensed software.** The Greatness Machine™ now feeds its curated output to a small team of engineers, pop culture classifiers, and subject matter experts to help surface  “the gold”, unlock the valuable data, and ultimately improve the precision of the results.

While it remains unclear how much of his own money he spent taking this groundbreaking idea from concept to completion, that figure is said to far exceed the combined cost of those seven items he took into the closet in 1980 (this according to a former editor at Wired magazine who claimed to have once shared a Lyft with Our Founder while attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas). The first iteration of the Greatness Machine™ is estimated to have been completed somewhere between the release of the Roadrunner supercomputer in 2008 and the beginning of development of the Fugaku supercomputer in 2014. ***

* Living undercover since his late teens, he has out of precaution, chosen to be referred to as simply Our Founder. A Non-Official Cover (NOC), he lives in the shadows; never revealing his exact location, avoiding public meet-ups, staying dark in Zoom meetings, and routinely speaking through voice distortion. Because of this, employees at MountRushmoreOf.com and licensees of his pop culture-specific software fittingly refer to him as the Banksy of Trivia.

** Sources (who would not go on record) say various iterations of the proprietary software are being used by governments, private cyber security firms, and financial institutions to help uncover insights that can detect threats, reduce risk, improve security, and protect sensitive data from malicious actors.

*** The $100-million Roadrunner built by IBM was designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops. The Fugaku supercomputer, valued at about $1 billion, is used for scientific research, including drug discovery and climate simulations, and is currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, capable of performing 442 quadrillion calculations per second.