My first job out of high school was at a tiny, unprofitable address verification company that was about as boring or mundane a subject matter as you could get. (I know more about addresses than I ever cared to know!) While address updates still arrived on a DVD every month, we were pushing for people to automate verification through online APIs, which back that was still kind of a novel thing. After a few years of just a small team working hard on it, we became the #1 search result, and by now, I think the company has dozens of employees.
Towards the end of college, I started doing my own thing — consulting work here and there or working on open source projects that I started as an undergraduate. After getting my master’s degree, I was looking for a company interested in taking the project under their wing to help it grow and to give that value back to the company and its customers.