This is less my background and more like a summarized version of my life story.
As for education, I'm a college drop out who learned C++ on my own as a hobby by reading books and copying and implementing a lot of other people's code. I was particularly inspired at a young age by UltraHLE, a Nintendo 64 emulator, as at the time when my family could not afford a console and would never buy one even if we could. I completed a 2 year Cisco course called CCNA while in high school, very educational from a computer networking perspective. Recently(I'm 33) did some math courses for fun, mostly to prove to myself and my 10 year old son I could do it. I got high A's the calc series including a 97% on Calc 3.
I began working phone sales when I was 19, starting out making $9 per hour and quickly progressed through the ranks eventually as much as 300k per year as a top closer(read: expert psychological manipulator) at my peak. At 27 I quit that job because it was up and down like the ocean and I bought a house, 25% of a Sports Bar in old town Scottsdale AZ, opened a computer repair store front in Chandler AZ, and opened a call center in Tempe AZ, more or less all at once. I worked in and learned a lot about the merchant processing and credit card industries, business relationships, business partners and transactions and other nuances of being in that position. Ultimately, in my quest to make it big this turned out to be too many things to juggle at once and combined with some bad luck and losing our liquor license on a technicality, I lost or sold most of that including my marriage. I couldn't keep up with the investments or travel and networking lifestyles that my peers were, some of whom would tell me about their $50k revenue
days from behind a computer or an office desk where the vast majority of that money was profit. I learned what incredible stress was and found value in reducing my responsibilities and really started to live by the the idea of making more by doing less. Truly building upon the working harder, not smarter philosophy I preached to my customers for so long.
Sales environments rely heavily on lead sources, so I took the next step up the food chain and transitioned into lead brokering and generation. Instead of being the guy doing all the hard work, I wanted to be the guy who got paid for helping someone else do the heavy lifting. This lead to a lot of internet marketing experience which is one of the verticals our call center was involved. One of those projects I spent tens of thousands of dollars generating very advance emailing software which I used and sold as a service. Prior to this in 2013, before there was any written regulation, I spend tens of thousands more building a fully fledged cryptocurrency exchange called ColdCryptos and then shut it down when I realized it would require $1 Million to establish the necessary Money Service Business licences to operate in the US alone. I had no experience seeking VC and my funds were beginning to dwindle so I had to focus on a more immediate way to supplement my income. The Financial Crimes Enforcement classified crypto as a 'store of value' and therefore considered 'money' or something to that effect so that messed up my plans. The unique part about that exchange was the ability to specify if your trading balance was in cold storage or not and you could even trade it in that state. This assured that when an exchange was hacked, you'd not have to worry about getting your crypto back since it was locked away in cold storage. With most or all exchanges today, when there is a hack, they don't say whose balance that actually was, because they mix 20% or so of their total balance together in a hot wallet. They have to do this so when people request withdrawals, it won't take days to get the money out of a cold wallet and transferred out. But when your money is stored in this melting pot hot wallet and they get hacked, one day you'll try to withdraw it and they say, "oops, we suffered a security breach, we'll get back to you". For anyone curious and not informed on the subject and risk you impose on yourself by using an exchange like this, research
Mt. Gox and
Mark Karpeles. As of this writing I still have the entire source code for sale if anyone is interested in it. There were several other advanced features in terms of security that were very creative involving multi-signature techniques, pump and dump protection with buy wall detection, etc. Had any of this worked out, I'd be a lot better off than I am today.
Since all of this I've managed to survive on a residual income from the merchant processing industry, while I build up other things which follow in the footsteps of making more by doing less. This board is one of those things so I appreciate each and every one of you who participate and contribute here!
