# The Story of viaPrize

## Bet
Noah Chon Lee initially became involved with crowdfunded prizes when an Oxford researcher bet him $1000 that he would not be able to build a platform with active users outsourcing their public goods ideas that people build. 
Noah accepted the challenge and spent the next year researching the concept on weekends in-between training with the Marine Corps and then managing a team at an AI company on weekdays. 

## Birth
Eventually, he met Jehan Azad who built the MVP for viaPrize.org as a side project at the end of 2021. He wanted someone to continue the project and handed it off to Noah who decided to build up the platform full-time at the start of April 2023 when he met Vitalik Buterin and members of the Gitcoin team who inspired him. 
The team has grown quickly to have two smart contract developers, an operations lead, a team lead, and an advisor. Everything you can see in our github and the prizes people have won that are featured on the website all occurred in April 2023.

## Beyond
This is only the first chapter. 
More of the story may be found here: https://www.viaprize.org/blog