Richard Price, the founder of Academia.edu, had the idea for the company when finishing his PhD at Oxford in philosophy.
As Richard was finishing his PhD, he decided he wanted to have a homepage where he could say “this is who I am; this is what I have been working on; here are my papers.” At the time, Oxford offered a few megabytes of space for personal websites, and you had to write your own HTML, and FTP files to the server yourself. Richard thought “there should be a one-click way of creating a homepage, and uploading papers. Having a homepage shouldn’t require technical ability.” Richard asked a few of his fellow graduate students, and they felt the same way.
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