“The summer’s over and we’re watchin’ the sun finally set, seems like it’s forever now, but forever’s here”

Summer was over, and it was time to go back to school. It was my freshmen year of high school. Initially, I was excited about starting high school and reconnecting with friends from elementary school who had went to different middle schools. The newness of high school wore off after about a month or so when the homework and tests started to pile up. Around the same time, The Social Network came out. I, like many others, got inspired by this movie and decided to build something. I thought a lot about the problems I had with Facebook and ways I felt that it could be better. What I came up with was a concept that categorized content based on the subject matter. For example, if you were posting about a new song that you were listening to, it’d be posted in the music feed. If you just finished a great book that you couldn’t put down, you’d put it in the books feed. I came up with a few basic feeds, music, books, thoughts, and a few others. Little did I know this was really the first iteration of Communly; staying connected to the things that interest you. SwiftSharing launched January 11, 2011.

At first, a majority of the users were my friends from school. We used the service as a means to communicate in class because Facebook and other social sites were blocked, and we couldn’t use our phones during class. I was excited to have the first 100 users. I wanted to grow the userbase from those first initial 100 users to 1000 to 10,000 and so on. I posted about SwiftSharing on a few forums and other sites. I saw a few people outside of my friend group starting to sign up. At the same time, word spread around school about SwiftSharing, and that a freshmen was building a new social network.

SwiftSharing started to take off outside of my high school and spread across the country to other teenagers who all thought the idea of sharing the things that interested them was a good idea. By the end of the school year, we were quickly approaching 10,000 users. By this time, Paul had come on board to help build SwiftSharing out. We decided to attend Startup Weekend DFW and pitch the idea for SwiftSharing.

We pitched SwiftSharing at Startup Weekend, and got the interest of several people who worked throughout the weekend. We decided to build an entirely different product, a social network that focused on categorizing people based on your relationship. We all had the similar problem of wanting to post content to Facebook, but not wanting to distribute it to all of our friends. The concept was basically Google Plus. We launched the service at the end of the weekend. We called it EnterLife. Unfortunately, we didn’t win Startup Weekend, but we decided we’d keep working on EnterLife even after Startup Weekend while maintaining SwiftSharing. This all sounded really good, but it didn’t work very well. Ultimately, Paul and I were driven apart due to a third party and didn’t communicate for months. We ultimately had to shut down SwiftSharing because the site wasn’t generating revenue because we felt that putting ads on the site would interfere with the user experience. The server bills were pilling up, and I had no income of my own.

During the same time, I met one of my best friends, Tyler. We decided that we wanted to partner together and open a creative agency, The Innovative Ones. We’d do branding and website design for small businesses. Tyler would bring in the clients, and I’d do the work. Tyler also ran a computer repair business, and I’d help him with that as well. Overall, it was a really solid partnership.

Summer ended once again, and we decided we needed a place to work. We looked around town for offices and ultimately settled on a small office off one of the main roads back home. Getting an office increased my productivity immensely because I was no longer distracted by everything that came along with working at home (parents, siblings, etc) and I had my own space to do what I wanted to and be freely creative. Paul and I reconnected shortly after we leased the space, and I brought him onboard to help out with The Innovative Ones. Paul and I both were full of ideas, and we wanted a project of our own to build instead of building sites for clients. We came up with an idea where users were rewarded for their online interactions with offline experiences. We called the project The Sandbox.

The Sandbox worked by giving users credits for making posts on social media. If I posted a photo I earned a certain amount of credit. Those credits were then to be used to redeem what we called experiences. Experiences were coupons that you could use at local restaurants. Looking back, we weren’t solving a real problem.

Paul and I heard about a new opportunity called the Thiel Fellowship. Basically, the Thiel Fellowship allows the brightest individuals under 20 $100,000 to pursue their dreams over 2 years. The catch is you must drop out of school to receive the money. We decided to apply. We were shocked to find out that we made it past the first round of selection because we knew we were competing with people who were willing to drop out of prestigious universities like Harvard and Yale. There are 4 rounds of selection, Paul and I made it through 3 of those. We decided that we would make a trip to San Francisco and immerse ourselves in the startup culture that is Silicon Valley.

Paul and I flew to San Francisco during April 2012.

We went to San Francisco with no plans and no where to stay. We decided to wing it. We went to another Startup Weekend, but this time it was in Mountain View. We met a lot of awesome people there who I’m still connected to today. We worked on an app called Parkle, that was essentially a service to make parking in metro areas easier by reminding you how much time you had left on your parking meter. Once again, we didn’t win Startup Weekend, but we did win by finding a place to stay for a few days. We met a woman named Alicia who took us to a party at this mansion in the Twin Peaks of San Francisco called The Glint. We stayed there for a few days.

I managed to score a meeting with an investor from a firm called Blue Run Ventures. We met with him at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto. The meeting was itself was good, but it made us realize that we were working on something that wasn’t solving a real problem. After the meeting, we used AirBNB to find a place in Mountain View to stay for the remainder of our trip. Before we headed there, we decided to stop at a cafe in Mountain View called Red Rock Cafe. We decided to go back to the drawing board with the idea we had. Communly was born. We registered communly.com before we left.

Paul took an interview with a company named Wanelo, and eventually got hired fulltime as an engineer there. We’re still friends today, though.

Near the end of our trip, I realized that I couldn’t go back to Longview High School and NOT focus on my dreams. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about finishing my time in high school. The only thing I knew was that I needed to shift my focus from high school to the things I was passionate about. Whenever I returned to school, I was immediately called into the office and questioned about where I had been the week before. I didn’t attempt to fabricate a story about me being sick, I told the truth about being in San Francisco for a week and immersing myself in the things I’m passionate about. Of course that wasn’t a good enough excuse, despite me getting statements from the various people I met about the bright future I had in technology. The school presented me with 2 options, pay a truancy fine close to $5,000 or withdraw from school. Knowing my mom didn’t have the money to pay the truancy fine or worth our time fighting it, I decided to just withdraw from school. I also decided to make another drastic change, to move to San Francisco at 16.

I booked a plane ticket to San Francisco from Dallas. I had money, but no plan. I found a place called StartupHouse and booked one night there. I stayed there for one night, and I couldn’t endure another night. During Startup Weekend, I connected with a designer from Dallas named Kolby. He also moved to San Francisco from Dallas and had a place and told me to come over. Little did I know, I’d call this place “home” for the next few months. I loved the energy that Kolby, Gio, Devan and I created there. There was rarely a night we weren’t working to 4 or 5 AM.

At this point, I wasn’t focused on Communly. We put up a simple splash page and that was about it. I was too engulfed with client work to focus on Communly. TechCrunch was hosting a hackathon the weekend prior to their Disrupt conference. I registered to attend along with a few friends. Ultimately, Gio, Shahed, and I decided to build an early version of Communly at the Hackathon. Communly had a focus on communities, but we wanted to build communities around hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Communities served as a place to aggregate content around a certain topic on the social web. For example, a Drake community would pull content from Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr relating to Drake. We weren’t really doing anything extraordinary at this point, and Communly was more so a side project at this point. Communly once again took the back burner to my client work.

A few months later, Communly was supposed to launch on October 30, but we missed that date by over a week. At this point, I was ready to give up and just build something else, but instead I rewrote the entire PHP application on Rails over the span of a couple of months. I had a prototype that was semi-ready to go and emails of potential users from the splash page I’d put up months earlier. At this point it was February 2013, I’d gone back to Texas for a couple weeks. I remember sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s living room sending out invites to users and getting feedback. It was a surreal moment. At that moment, I decided to do everything in my power to focus on Communly full time.

I put together a few client projects that would last me a couple of months to live in San Francisco, and booked a ticket back to SF. At this point, Kolby went back to Fort Worth, Devan back to London, and Gio back to Miami. I was in San Francisco pretty much alone, with the exception of my friend Paul. I worked out of Panera Bread on King Street during the day just to get out and mingle with people. I worked on nothing but Communly. Neil, who I’d known since my SwiftSharing and Sandbox days and also was the first person I met whenever I got to San Francisco, was my co-founder at the time. We wanted desperately to grow Communly, raise money, and focus on it full time.

I went back home for a few weeks to visit my family. I’m still only 16, so I went home somewhat regulary. Neil gave me a call one day that this guy I’d never heard of named Taj Stansberry was interested in what we were doing. So of course, I googled his name. The results I got all kind of amazed me. I remember reading his wikipedia page and seeing all the people he’d done music videos for and thinking what’s the possible synergy here between some music video director and a social media startup. Eventually, all three of us hopped on a phone call together and discussed how we could all work together to achieve Communly’s goal. Those first few calls were extremely awkward, but we all felt that Taj would be a vital asset to Communly not only for his connections with influencers in the entertainment industry, but also his skill-set in branding and marketing.

Taj flew Neil to Los Angeles for a weekend, and introduced him to his world. We were sold that this relationship work.

A couple of months later, we finalized our partnership with Taj and brought him on board as co-founder. Next, something crazy happened. Taj put Communly in a video he’d directed for Fabolous featuring Chris Brown. The name of the song was “Ready”. I wasn’t a huge fan of Fabolous, but after Taj put Communly in the video, I listened to that song over and over and over. The video aired on 106 and Park. I got all my friends together at the office space I was leasing in Texas to watch the video premiere. It was crazy seeing something I’d built on live TV broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of people. That was a special moment.

I returned to San Francisco after a few weeks, still alone. Neil introduced me to a lot of his friends in Berkeley, and they became my friends too. It was the top of the summer.

In July, Neil and I made the trip down to Los Angeles to kick it with Taj and talk about the direction we wanted to take the company, as well as how we could seamlessly merge Taj’s network with Communly. During the time we were in LA, Taj had 2 major video shoots, both for videos that have yet to be released. Coming from a small town in Texas, I didn’t know what it was like to be on any set or to meet anyone of any level of influence, so that really got me excited.

The first day, we were on seat of a video for Swizz Beatz. It was an incredible experience. It was a star studded video with Rick Ross, 2Chainz, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Birdman, and more. I was in awe over how long it took for such a short video to be shot. The next day Taj shot ‘Money Trees’ for Kendrick Lamar. The video was shot in the middle of a desert in Santa Clarita. I remember meeting Kendrick and Taj telling him about Communly and the things we were doing, but we all agreed we weren’t ready for a star to get behind the Communly brand and push a product that wasn’t ready.

I went back to the bay from LA feeling an incredible sense of urgency, the urgency to get this product to the point where we could have a Kendrick Lamar or Swizz Beatz use it with no problem. We also decided at this point, we wanted to build our own communities around content that our users created, so we scraped the entire aggregation concept.

“Can’t even drive with the top off
I been workin’ so hard on the album, I missed the whole summer”

It was October 2013. Once again, the summer was over. I returned to Texas for a couple weeks to check up on my family. Devan let me know that he was back in San Francisco, raised money for his startup, Chec, and welcomed me to come live with him, and he did the same for Kolby. I was incredibly excited to come back to San Francisco and build with the people I’d started my San Francisco journey with. I didn’t waste any time and booked a flight. I landed in San Francisco at 4:30 PM.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked harder than I worked during those 3 months. I completely rewrote all of the sloppy code I’d written for Communly, redesigned it, and made a ton of adjustments to our branding. I felt like Communly was something I could finally show off with full confidence and tell people that I made that. Everyone else was also very happy about the progress we made on a technical end.

A few months pass, and we ventured down to Los Angeles one weekend so I could link up with Taj, and take a break from constantly working. I had a conversation on a lifeguard tower one night with Devan about how he managed to raise money and who it was from. After that conversation, Devan introduced us to John Strong.