It's so wild to me though, because it sounds like when you started RSS, podcasting wasn't even on your, well, I mean, it was on your radar in the sense that, like you said, it wasn't new, but it wasn't that you purchased RSS in the hopes of starting a podcasting company. No, not at all. I mean, it was to save, save feed reading and feed readers. I'm a news obsessed person and that's where my mind was, is news consumption.
And if everybody stops using RSS, it stops supporting it on their websites and blogs, like my, I was definitely going to lose out. I love staying current on news and I just couldn't imagine a world where that wasn't happening or where it was happening inside a Facebook feed. Like it just didn't work for me. So, but yeah, podcasting wasn't on my radar at that point.
And on my end, basically I was building and maintaining this project, it's podcast generator content management system for free, you know, as a hobby. I didn't really monetize it. And you know how many times during the years, during the 13 years I've been working on it for free, basically on the spare time, how many times I thought, man, I don't have, I don't know if I should continue. But then people would drive me like, oh, it's not working.
It's not compatible with these, I don't know, with this browser. So I kept feeling that people were using it and it had a certain impact. So it's kind of serendipitous really how we got there because I could have stopped before. I had the drive of continuing working to my project just because people were using it. So I knew there was a market fit.
Well, I mean, thank goodness that you did though, because if you had stopped, we wouldn't have what we have now, which is this amazing platform for podcasting. Yeah. Interestingly enough, the code base of Podcast Generator after the first year was completely replaced with a new code base. So meaning now there's no one line of code from Podcast Generator, but the first year, this is what allowed our company to start with. We literally use the Podcast Generator. That's amazing.
That's absolutely amazing. So now you kind of gave a little bit about what you were doing Alberto, but then what were you doing at the time whenever you decided to purchase RSS? Do you want to talk about that at all? Yeah. I mean, it's not secret. So I'm an entrepreneur and have a degree from Brigham Young University in entrepreneurship. I started my first business to put myself through school and moved to the Arizona, the Phoenix, Arizona area.
And like most, if you know an entrepreneur, you know that their interests are varied and the common denominator is a problem to solve and a passion for that problem. Living in Arizona, I had a tremendous amount of opportunities to do. I feel like looking back, I'm kind of shocked at how much I did and how varied the things were. So I got my start in real estate in Arizona and worked during the buildup of the bubble, so to speak, the real estate bubble that people are familiar with.
I was kind of at ground zero for the perfect storm for being involved in real estate development from 2005, six, seven. I got my master's degree in real estate development 2008 and had a front row seat to the implosion and to what the effects were of a market downturn in real estate as well. It was really interesting.
Right out of college, I had done some banking and so very familiar with some of the regulations, rules and practices, procedures of how people interact on a commercial basis with banks. And so I did some commercial real estate consulting. And then I had an opportunity to partner up with some folks who were developing technology out of the Army Corps of Engineers laboratory and taking patents that they were developing and commercializing those patents. And that was fascinating work.
It was right in the middle of the war in Afghanistan. One of the partners was a two-star general at the time. And we were working on stuff that felt very mission driven and exciting and environmentally useful. So this was like we had a trifecta of things we were working on that were environmentally sustainable, beneficial to the environment and how those could be utilized in the Department of Defense, as well as supporting some other missions critical at the time. And let's see that.
So anyway, that puts me that also.