To set some context, a few weeks before this story really got started I was just a contractor helping a friend with construction work. I had just graduated from my economics studies, there was a recession, and people seemed to not be hiring or I wasn’t approaching the process well. I wasn’t doing e-sports anymore as I had chosen to go to school and pursue the fruits of math and economics. So, I needed a job and found one with a friend’s company quickly doing construction while I worked on applying for more aligned work. However when this company lost the contract for cutting corners I decided, since I was available and with approval from my employeer at the time, I figured I would approach the owners about overseeing the building until a proper management team could be found. I knew the building quite well. So I did, and they said yes! I was so excited. On Monday of the following week, I’m managing a one hundred thousand square foot building with multiple private colocations. A week prior I was just scraping drywall and general labor.
Moving forward two weeks. It was a cold winter day in Chicago and I was managing the data center. It was a quiet day that turned out to be one that anyone dreads in their first few weeks on a project. A day, it turned out, that wouldn’t be forgotten. It all started as I turned a corner in a maintenance hall when alarms started blaring, everything went into slow motion, and I started running through the building. In a matter of minutes, I was able to identify that a sprinkler head had blown near the roof access. It was quite the thing to see that much water coming down a thrid story stairwell. However, that was just the beginning of my problems.
The first to come along and make it’s self obvious was that the building did not have emergency procedures and support partners to handle this. Second, I didn’t know how to shut off the water so while we were stopping the flooding of several colocation rooms where servers running. And third, I realized that the construction dust had built up to the point that the sub pumps in the elevator shafts and the drains in the power rooms had been plugged. There were only twenty or thirty minutes to stop this or we would have a catastrophe on our hands where the generators and power systems flooded which would require an evacuation of the building. Just in the nick of time, with minutes to spare we were about to stop the water. Rescuing a data center from flooding, and saving my clients tens of millions of dollars turned out to be quite the example of adapting and learning on the fly.
On my journey, I have done and seen some pretty incredible things, and overall, I shine when something is starting and when things get tough. This is what I do, not just okay, and it’s a pursuit of excellence and where it comes through is by inspiring and organizing people to get results done, pulling clarity out of deep focus in hard times, and that I always have a basis that anything I apply myself to is meaningful. Thus, the light in the dark or the optimism rarely fades. Yet, I’m only myself and it’s those around me that also push and inspire me to achieve, and without that basis to leap from less would happen for anyone. Outside of inspiring, organizing, or finding meaning, it’s the joy of being, all in this together, and everyone has something to bring to the table, which has taught me the most.
After a pretty wild time in privately owned data centers, the next stop was working for Jeff Wigley at Sun Trading managing their global presence. This was a company that does high-frequency trading, automating sections of operations for our management of colocations. After I left the position at Sun Trading I wandered around for a while driving Uber to ask people questions and getting feedback on varying subjects JP Morgan consulting on setting up site reliability engineering teams. My most recent stop has been building innovation spaces as I always love a new market to understand, a combination of several, and new ideas give me that challenge. Many things have come from that like the build of an equity splitting application from studies on sharing in business to help people plan ideas and set expectations. This required two and a half million dollars of time, relationships, and money in retrospect, and we crowdsourced this with only twenty thousand dollars and a vision.
Then we built a goal and expectation setting application, like a journal, where people help each other get clarity on where they are, where they have been, and are going. This was again, built up by our community over months with lots of contributions, people enjoyed it, thus needing a very small amount of money, the right people, and a vision to build. Over the last part of 2022 we spent
Encompassing all of these projects, over the last three years all of this community and asset building has been part of an iterative build of the theory and implementation of an organizational model following distributed autonomous organizational research. I first noticed this in the rise of Ethereum, smart contracts, and systems like a Kibbutz for example, and after which I just never looked back. This turned out to be the best investment I have ever made and now it’s time to scale with those that appreciate the potential.
In the process, I built a think tank community to tackle wicked complex problems, this grew into a private incubator, supported by the community. I then brought in the capital, key partnerships, and members to pull off results as an idea factory. After the setup part of the journey, taking about three years, I then founded three companies in our group amongst the fifty or so that came through. We also built several applications to help people collaborate and generate more value including a mentoring program, an equity splitting application, an idea sprint company, and a proof of concept in DeFi arbitrage.
Focusing on the most recent adventure of founding innovation environments, communities, and incubators have been quite the experience to behold. It taught me what it took to be responsible for the contribution of many people to many ideas. It is an honor to be a custodian with the weight of so much trust given to you. It then is becoming a flywheel it comes with other like getting to experience building ideas that are meaningful while getting to manage and build out the ecosystem that is helping to build more ideas. In a more granular view, each day turned out to be dynamic while rising to the challenge of developing rapid solutions for some of the most complex problems known. In summary, I must admit that I’m still really enjoying my work and that it’s fun to be part of a change by making waves in organizational theory and things like the bottlenecks in collaboration. The experience of this changed my life and was worth every moment. So, by seeking excellence in myself, and fun as a product of my work I move forward through each step and I have noticed that there is a lot of joy in seeing that happen for individuals and organizations as they solve problems and grow.
Why I build is because I choose to, simply put. That is built upon the duty to respond to the sound that comes over the hills that one in life must respond to, whatever that chosen call is. For me, this is a duty to family, the people who accept you as who you are and cheers you on, and that perspective extends to my community and partners. You always want to do more than what is asked of these kinds of people. With this kind of jazz as a staple of consideration and respect, I get to say what you do and do what you say to make the lives of those around you better not only just myself. In life, this happens through a series of principles or universal rewards such as altruism, ego, profit, and learning. Simply put the outcome is a future where each can have better access to being able to build our ideas.
This impact is one that I am scaling at every chance I get and the results have been a consistent increase in being able to piece together big picture strategy, solutions, and orchestration of results. Paired with this, the adventures I have been on have given me the means to make thousands of people’s lives better and millions through my work. When that came around to benefit my life, the world came together for me.
All in all the high level is that it took a lot to be able to compete at a top world level in e-sports and then to work with some of the best financial institutions, yet it also gave back to me in other ways. It was a compromise for the time that worked really well. However, once I understood the collaboration improvements that were possible at the edge of philosophy and technology, building a space of peace to nurture people and ideas to change the world with a community of hyper researchers like myself became a requirement, then a passion, and further an obsession. It was an obsession with a lifestyle where I could align meaning and my efforts as who I was and replicate that triumph to something like the doorstep of more people where they could choose to take the opportunity. In order to better understand this our community choose to launch companies and support much larger group of companies with our process and tools. What we found was that it was the right time to form up into something that would be even more effective. What that is will be releasing in the next few months as of the writing of this article. Let’s just say that we have solved the people lacking self-esteem, responsibility, and efficacy problem paired with the startups needing money to build problem. How we will tackle this will be beautiful, elegant, and honest as all of our work as been. I’m excited to release more on this soon. However, if you are interested to learn more please reach out on the contact page here.
You have to wonder how someone does all of that. I often have thought this same thing. It was at the lowest moments when the light wasn’t shining brightly. Yet, things turned out quite nicely in the end. Hence from E-sports and economics to think tanks and incubators, it has been quite the adventure around the block. Thank you for your time today and the ability to share my story.
