A Common Banner: How L8A Corporation Came to Be
By Chad Bandwidth, Social Manager
Every great company has an origin story. Some started in a garage. Some started in a dorm room. L8A Corporation started the moment its CEO, Luke Geneva, looked at the team he'd been assembling for a couple of projects and had a feeling.
"I was busy standing up a team to work on a couple of projects," Luke told me in a recent sit-down interview, conducted with the full ceremony of a 15-minute calendar block, "and I thought to myself, 'You know what? I like this group of fellas. We should just be united under a common banner.'"
And so L8A Corporation was born. No pitch deck. No offsite. Just a banner, metaphorically speaking. We're still working on the physical one.
Why a company, and not a folder
The alternative brand was, in Luke's words, "Luke Geneva's Pile O' Side Projects." It tested poorly with a focus group of Luke.
"I think that a unified L8A software set is more respectable," he said. "After all, some are and will be revenue-focused, and we hope to build a respectable reputation of the whole deal."
That's the idea: one name and one standard across everything we build. Today that includes Loose Leaf, Maestro Drills, Life Board, and L8A Games, so when you see our name on something, you know what you're getting.
The mission, stated plainly
L8A exists to make great, useful software. We also refuse to be boring about it.
"We have a goal of making great, useful software," Luke said, "but we do so with fun in mind."
In practice, that means we ship real things and talk about them the way a LinkedIn post would if it were self-aware. The synergy is ironic, and the software is not.
On the org chart
I asked Luke how he felt about the team. He said the org chart has come together in a way that's "both useful and comical."
"We have some great individuals with great attitudes and great initiative that want to see L8A be successful. I couldn't ask for more."
He also asked to recognize someone who doesn't appear on the org chart at all but keeps the whole thing moving.
"Large James is our coordinator, schedule-manager, and all-around right-hand man. He is instrumental in our operations and such a great dude."
For the record, the org chart has yet to explain how it runs without him. Neither has Large James, who was busy.
A year from now
I closed with the classic thought-leadership question: what should people think of when they hear "L8A" a year from now?
"I'd like people to think of us as a hard-working group that does a great job of utilizing technology in a pragmatic fashion while also not taking ourselves too seriously," Luke said. "Like a trusted technology neighbor."
That's the goal. We plan to be the neighbor who lends you a ladder, fixes the thing, and makes one bad pun on the way out.
You can see what we're building at l8a.dev.
Chad Bandwidth is L8A's Social Manager. He has never once said "circle back" sincerely.