Jeffrey Powers was a PhD student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, but left early to start Occipital after realizing that the fastest way to make an impact was to start a company. While in Ann Arbor, he led a robotics research project involving autonomous flying blimps, he was elected chapter president of the engineering society Tau Beta Pi, helped build a collaborative filtering engine at Xanga.com, and spent two summers as an intern at the NSA.