---
title: About Jeff Tirey (the public brief)
summary: Jeff Tirey founded Thalatta. He helped build the early web and has spent 25 years on one idea — making knowledge open, findable, and useful — from Textkit, to co-founding Mongoose Metrics (acquired 2014), to a decade in machine learning, to enterprise AI, to Thalatta. This is the short public version; the fuller story is told in the glass demo, and best over coffee.
tags: [about, founder, jeff, public-brief]
updated: 2026-07-14
source: about-jeff.md (gated bundle), app/about/page.tsx
---

# About Jeff Tirey

**Jeff Tirey** is the founder of [Thalatta](about-thalatta.md). The short version: **he helped
build the early internet, and he's spent 25 years sharing knowledge through it** — one idea worn
in different clothes, from the early web, through digital attribution, into machine learning, and
now into AI agents and the memory layers that make them reliable.

The arc, briefly:

- **The early web.** Jeff built **Textkit.com**, which gave away ancient Greek and Latin learning
  to the whole internet — canonical grammars and readers as free PDFs, no paywall, no account —
  years before Google Books. It became one of the most trusted reference sites of the early web,
  linked by the Library of Congress and major university classics departments. It's where he
  learned first-hand how knowledge and authority move across a network.
- **Mongoose Metrics.** Co-founder of a Cleveland company that was first to connect an offline
  phone call back to Google Analytics and Google paid search. Acquired in **2014**.
- **The machine-learning decade.** Prediction, decision trees, ML-driven products — from **2010**,
  long before LLMs made "AI" a household word.
- **Enterprise AI.** Most recently he built an enterprise RAG system and worked hands-on with
  dozens of companies onboarding AI — training teams, building tools, shipping agents.
- **Thalatta — now.** Founded in **2025**, based in **Northeast Ohio**. One person who's seen
  every layer — the web, the data, the models, the agents — sitting with your team and building
  the thing that does a real job.

He holds a **BA in Classics** and an **MBA** — the Classics degree is why the company is named
in ancient Greek (see [the name](xenophon.md)).

This is deliberately the short version. The fuller story — the track record in detail, and the
person behind it — is part of the briefing inside [the glass demo](the-glass-demo.md), and it's
better over coffee: **thalatta.ai/coffee**.