Minnesotan is a pioneer in online number-crunching

Karl Ebert has been creating and sharing calculators since the early days of Internet.

Karl Ebert can credit the Roth IRA for his success. It was 1998, and Ebert thought he might convert some money from a traditional IRA to a Roth.

But he couldn't find a calculator to show him if it made financial sense.

So the computer science minor with an MBA in finance built one.

"It worked great. And my goal was to market it and sell it," he said. "Having no contacts and no means of actually marketing that one little calculator, I quickly realized it was something to put on my website that was pretty cool..."

LA Times: Minnesotan is a pioneer in online number-crunching