I’m Amy Irvin, host of Out to Lunch in Baton Rouge. I was a college student once. A long time ago. And like a lot of college students, I picked some of my classes based on the professor. Word of mouth, mostly. What my friends said. Whether the 8 a.m. course section was worth getting out of bed for or not.

These days, there’s a website that tries to do that systematically. You’ve probably heard of it. Rate My Professor. And if you’ve ever spent time on it, you might have noticed it’s also a place where students settle scores, write reviews about a professor’s appearance, and occasionally make things up entirely.

My lunch guest, Nash Mahmoud, noticed the same thing. He happens to be a professor. He also happens to be a software engineer. So he built something better.

Nash came to the United States from Jordan in 2008 to pursue a graduate degree at Mississippi State. He got his master’s, then his PhD, then a tenure-track faculty offer at LSU — and somewhere along the way between learning his way around campus, walking to football games, and dining at local spots around town, Baton Rouge became home.

He’s been teaching software engineering at LSU for the better part of a decade. A few years ago, while advising nearly 40 students at once, he started paying close attention to how they were using Rate My Professor to make decisions about their education. What he saw bothered him: anonymous reviews, no way to verify whether the reviewer was even a real student, bias against female faculty, and a single bad comment that could follow a professor for years.

Nash spent a couple of years researching the problem. Then he started coding. On March 14th, 2024 — Pi Day  — Nash launched Professor Index, a verified, AI-powered professor review platform designed to reduce misinformation and bias. It’s now live at 20 universities and has more than 3,500 downloads. Professor Index has become so popular that students are sending in requests to add more campuses faster than he can keep up.

My other lunch guest, Courtney Sparkman, taught himself to code because a problem at his job was driving him crazy and he couldn’t find anyone else to fix it. He was running security companies, then. Now he runs a software company that serves 700 of them.

Courtney is from Chicago and moved to Baton Rouge when his wife — his fiancée at the time — got a job here after pharmacy school. He says the thing that surprised him most about Baton Rouge was how welcoming the city is to newcomers.

Courtney is a self-described serial entrepreneur. Before coming to Baton Rouge, he helped his father build a security guard company from the ground up — zero employees to about 300, and several million dollars in revenue — before they sold it. Then he went to work for a larger security firm and immediately recognized every problem he thought he’d left behind: guards showing up late, incident reports written hours after the fact, supervisors with no real-time visibility into what was happening in the field.

Courtney taught himself to code and built the solution himself. It’s called OfficerApps. 

OfficerApps launched in 2013.  Today, OfficerApps serves about 700 security companies, from five-person operations to firms with thousands of officers in the field.

Nash and Courtney have both figured out — the hard way, mostly — that building the thing is only the beginning. Getting people to use it, trust it, and tell someone else about it: that’s the actual work. 

Nash launched his Professor Index app on Pi Day and is now traveling to college campuses to make the case in person. And in Courtney's case, besides being the software developer he also answers OfficerApps support calls himself so customers know somebody’s there.

Neither of these fathers of apps born in Baton Rouge planned it quite the way it happened. That turns out to be a pretty common feature of good ideas.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at Mansurs on the Boulevard. You can find photos from this show by Ian Ledo and Miranda Albarez at itsbatonrouge.com.