This evening I was lucky enough to have dinner with Raphael Mudge, founder of the recently acquired proofreading startup After the Deadline.

This was a good week for him. On Tuesday Automattic announced they had acquired After the Deadline back and incorporated it into WordPress.  The announcement was immediately followed by a flurry of press coverage and widespread admiration of his success. As someone eloquently put it on HN, “It takes cast-iron balls the size of cantaloupes to make a product that competes against companies with six orders of magnitude more funding… and succeed.“

Raffi, as he is known on HackerNews, is easily one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. His optimism is contagious and his passion for his work is second to none. Smart too: did you know that After the Deadline uses a neural networks to identify errors? Yeah, wow.

Well done sir. Congrats again.