The birth of Voenix

It was a hot July in Toronto. I emerged out of the tube station into Spadina as swirls of piled up heat rose from the asphalt, even early in the morning. I was walking to my new teaching job. The school was in an old 1950s building wedged between glassy skyscrapers. The lift took me to the third floor and the doors opened and gave direct access to a large room, filled with computers and young people.

I approached the reception and asked where to go, they informed me that I would be working in a different location not far from the school. I typed the address on my phone and followed the directions to an even older church that was housing the summer school.

I climbed down a dark flight of stairs towards a gloomy corridor and despite the lack of sunlight the temperatures were surprisingly high. I started feeling tears of sweat forming on my spine, regretting my overly formal attire. Was I in the wrong place ? was I the only soul in there?

Suddenly, a rumble of people descending the stairs and a cacophony of young voices mixing in the stickiness of the air brought me back to reality. This church was indeed a summer school, and those loud teenagers were the students I had to mind for a three-hour class. Surprisingly, they herded themselves peacefully into the confinement of a windowless classroom, amid laughter.

“ Okay, please sit down. I am your new teacher, and I am going to be covering for Mr Ransky” I said, firmly.

“ Can we do something fun? “ Inquired a blond girl with long hair and a bored expression.

“ Sure thing. Mr Ransky has prepared a few fun things for you.”

“ Noooooooooooooo, I’m so sick of this ” screeched one of the boys dressed in rapper clothes, as he removed his cap and threw it into the air in a tantrum-like manner.

“ We thought you were going to be fun,” said another girl in a swan neck blouse and ultra-straightened hair.

“ Well, I might be fun too. But let us start on page…”

The bell rang at midday. The class resumed after the lunch break, and it was time for the students to hand in their essays. One by one, they stood up and marched from their desks to the teacher's desk. Judging by their footsteps, one might have thought they were handing in weights intead of papers. How horrifying was the thought of having to mark those extra-weighty essays? Would I have to cancel my dinner plans?

The day was over, we were all relieved to be out of that dungeon-like classroom. I went out for a walk to gasp some fresh air, but up in the skies, a summery storm was about to descend, and fierce winds blew the trees in front of the church’s entrance, making them sway like angry cherubins.

I would have to wait out the storm in the teacher’s room, despite my resolution to avoid it.

“ Are you new?” said a kind of cute guy with a moustache, as he lifted the cover of a photocopier, pressing a few buttons and keeping a fixed stare at me.

“ Yes, I am new here.”

His name was Keivan, a Persian by origin and Canadian by birth with dark inquisitive eyes framed by wrinkles that wiggled at their corners every time he expected a certain answer, as if his eyes spoke a language of their own.

I approached to read a notice sheet that was on one of the walls. It contained a long list of names.There must have been at least fifty.

“ What’s this list for?” I asked Keivan.

“ Well, this is a unionized school, and if you haven’t realized it yet, those are the names of the teachers who will be joining the team in order of preference. But to get your name on that list, you need to work for three years in this school. This is my third year.” And with that and a smirky smile, he shut the photocopier machine and left the room.

“ By the way, don’t forget to apply for your union card. You can get awesome discounts” a thread of his voice declared.

Another teacher was sitting at a round table, quietly sipping a freshly brewed coffee when an energetic middle-aged lady entered the room.

“ Hi, I’m Karen. Are you a new teacher? Would you like some coffee?”

Karen said she’d been working for that school every summer for the past five years and was struggling to get a permanent position. A double master's degree in Education and Journalism with years of experience. I knew chances of me landing a permanent contract were as dim as the light in that claustrophobic church turned educational centre. But that fact did not bother me nearly as much as the thirty pages of essays I had to correct for the next day. I had just joined an unionised school much as an ant joins a colony of workers or more pertinenetly a cockroach finds its way to an old and humid basement.

On my way back home, I run into the director of the school, Mr Hoseini, another Persian man, but not as cute. He wasn’t the one that hired me, but he called me to his office the first day. Now, Mr Hoseini was waiting for the tube and pretended not to see me, as I approached and started a conversation.

“ The school has recently opened up another campus north of the city, and I am going to supervise it. We have more than two thousand students on average, so we need a constant flow of teachers. Do you plan to teach in the long run?” He asked unconcernedly.

I returned back home and made some lunch. GG looked as though a hurricane had swept over his entire being, after spending the morning taking care of our daughter, his hair dishevelled and his voice unnaturally high-pitched. It was time for me to take up the baton. After putting our little girl in bed, I spent the best part of the hours before midnight crossing sentences, trying to decipher words and rewriting paragraphs.

The next morning I was awakened at six o’clock by one of the bosses, Jake Jackson. He wanted me earlier than expected because one of the teachers was sick.

“ Can you be here at eight o’clock?” he ordered.

“ Yes. I can make it. But I haven’t got anything ready for that class” I informed.

“ It’s okay; you will know what to do when you get there. There’s a list of to-dos for you their teacher has left on her desk”

I rubbed off my sleepiness and dashed to the shower to get ready to cover for Mrs whoever’s class. I worried the whole trip through, anticipating three hours of chaos ahead of me. Would I be able to pull it off with nothing but a few notes? It felt like a baptism of fire.

As it turned out, the entire month of July followed the same pattern, with Jake Jackson calling me every other morning at exactly the same time to cover for some sick or absent teacher. I was growing pretty tired of the whole thing, especially the tons of work I had to take home and complete late at night. Well, you get the picture.

During the times I was not in class, I researched the online hub, looking for material to use, reference books and that kind of stuff. I also came across new forms of technology that eased teachers' lives. There was this app, for example, that allowed you to simply take pictures and then write a couple of notes below the image so that a supply teacher would have a clear idea of what is that they were supposed to do with a task in hand. I inhabited the infra world of supply teaching, and I dreamt of yet a more powerful technology to speed the preparation time by ten folds, at least.

In honesty, I had been asking the universe to come up with a really cool idea that could hon GG's skills in computing and draw in some of my crazy ideas, at the same time. I assumed every person deserved a chance to fulfil their dreams. But in spite of it, I did not believe my ideas were worth anything.

I am going to travel back to Sydney, Australia, in 2014. One Friday evening, GG returned from work tired, worried and extremely irritable. I figured out he had had a difficult week. I asked him what was going on and he said there was a specific unsolvable issue at work and like all things of this nature, it was extremely important that it would be fixed asap. However, the solution was nowhere near in sight, instead, there was only desolation and despair. ( Or that’s how it felt to me when I saw him enter our tiny apartment)

I was the mother of a very young girl and knew absolutely nothing about his field of work. But seeing him so sad felt terrible. So, I begged him to explain the problem in detail, and I started drawing notes on a piece of paper. Eventually, after a long conversation, I suggested he try something different. I asked him to think of it as if it were a living organism. A new way of looking at the problem brought about a simpler solution. ( I won’t go into the details here)

At first, GG said it was a great idea, but that would not be possible to translate it into code. But I kept insisting and repeating that it would work, that he only needed to give it a try and start coding it ( that’s part of my craziness). I don’t know what happened then; it was outside of my control or intention. It was as though the light of creation was drawing on his face. ( excuse my exaggerated perceptions). Late that same night he sat in front of his PC and did not stop coding until he completed the whole thing. I was in awe of his relentless capacity. I remember the kookaburra birds screaming loudly as he typed, dashing from palm tree to palm tree, in search of insects in the blue light emitted by the tiny piece of Australian forest reservoir that surrounded our apartment building.

Then, I forgot about the whole thing pretty quickly, and as it turned out, his program was a success, and it managed to convince their big customers. The whole episode stayed in that room in Sydney. About a year later, for some reason, I started inquiring about that program, and I learnt that it was still being used by the company. Then, out of nowhere, GG told me that the CEO was thinking of selling the program to prospective clients. Those words blew my mind. It had never occurred to me that any of my ideas ( I did not code a single line or contribute in any practical way ) could be commercialized. The fact that the program was being used did not have the same psychological impact on me as the fact that it could be sold. That was transformational, and I began thinking that if the CEO of a multinational firm thought the idea was worth selling, then, I would have to believe in my ideas too. The only thing I had wanted back then, was to help solve a work problem, but now the picture started to change. And in this picture, we were creating ideas and exploring our potential beyond the constrictions and frustrations of a regular job.

Fast forward to my job in downtown Toronto; on a day my students had gone out for breakfast with another teacher and would be arriving late. I was in their classroom, checking books, curious to see what material the other instructors used. Then I took my phone and started taking pictures of a few pages. Normally, I’d take a few books home and spend hours scanning content to prepare for my lessons. It was a time-consuming task. First, you had to scan the text, then save it in a folder, then open it again and crop an exercise or two, paste it on another google doc document and so on until you had enough material to cover for a class. My life had pretty much turned into scanning activities from a diversity of sources to create fun and engaging lessons, because all teachers know that a single book can achieve only so much, and students want a constant flow of engaging and fun tasks. So, if that was the trade secret, the idea I was looking for had to be near.

So it happened, almost spontaneously, that V-scanner started hatching from my brain into the realm of the possible. Convincing GG to develop a tool to help digitize content fast and would also allow for immediate editability and shareability didn’t take that long, since this would be a tool we could market ourselves, without anyone else’s interference. Again, he thought the idea was good, but he did not have enough time to start coding mobile apps. He was constantly busy with his own job and often too tired and stressed out.

This is when the whole COVID-19 pandemic was hitting the hardest, and despite the darkness of those days confined in our homes, there was a ray of hope for our new project. This came in the figure of a colleague of his, who is also a good friend. Mike had to start learning an entirely new language so that he could start coding the Android version of V-scanner whilst GG focused on the Apple system. Mike positively surprised us both when he came up with the first version of the V-scanner app in less than three weeks' time. After that, they both continued releasing more and more sophisticated versions of the app, including better AI technology and adding cool features and making the app look and feel a lot more intuitive and user-friendly.

So, all in all, we created an app that helps people digitize content speedily and reliably. That enhances and transforms the way people study and work, by turning a smartphone into a practical and portable scanner that evolves the concept of scanning by allowing users to edit their text immediately, upload it to the cloud and share it with others. But also, we created a company that has some more to offer and more importantly perhaps; a dream was born.

You can find more information about Voenix Technologies here:

https://t.co/902EiMrTWB