A vaguely relevant anecdote: in my year before joining Google, I was a Patent Agent, and I got assigned to help Chinedu Echeruo of HopStop [1] with his patent.

A vaguely relevant anecdote: in my year before joining Google, I was a Patent Agent, and I got assigned to help Chinedu Echeruo of HopStop [1] with his patent. He was in NYC and I never actually met him; we just talked on the phone. "Nigeria" is almost a joke in tech circles, with all the Princes who need your help to get their fortunes out, but Chinedu is Nigerian. At the time, his was the only service that had NYC transit schedules online, and he did it largely by paper-scraping! They would take the paper bus & subway schedules, and OCR or hand-code the data. Nowadays, almost every city has their transit schedules online. HopStop was bought by Apple eventually. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HopStop