Oh, Hello

I should introduce myself briefly. I’m Brady. I’ve probably always skewed nerdy on the geek nerd spectrum but I pretty much tow the median line. I’ve been coding since I was about 10. First qBasic and Pascal on DOS. My friend and I ran a BBS on a dedicated phone line I convinced my mom to install for the fax machine. We played TradeWars 2002 and Usurper and wrote scripts to automate trading and battles. I also geek out about basketball, cooking, gardening, human computer interfaces, the future of work, biology and literature.

I helped pay my way through school with web development jobs (English Lit at KU, because in 1997, KU didn’t yet offer a web development curriculum in their engineering school) then joined Peace Corps Guyana as an English and reading teacher for a couple years. I thought I might want to make teaching a career. When I returned I got married to my best friend, Alicia. Five years later we welcomed our daughter Asha into the world and just three months ago our son Erick joined us.

I eventually decided that I didn’t want to teach but did want to get back into building for the web. I ran online marketing for what became a two-time Inc. 500 ecommerce company that was acquired by a competitor, and, for the past several years, have been helping build RH Reality Check from a startup of three people within the United Nations Foundation into the the most influential independent media outlet for sexual and reproductive health and social justice issues on the web with a team of more than twenty and approaching a million monthly pageviews.

With the few hours that I can cobble together every week right now, I’m working on building SpareChair, a coworking community that provides members easy access to cool workspaces and interesting people to work with. It’s real world social and professional networking on top of a marketplace for workspace. A mashup of Meetup and Linkedin on top of Airbnb. SpareChair is creating real value by empowering freelancers, the growing remote workforce and digital nomads with a deeply valuable community and access to a vast and varied marketplace of workspaces around the world.

My colleague at RHRC, Sharona Coutts, came up with the idea after she joined the RHRC team and faced the reality of working from home as part of a team of remote workers. We talked about it a few times and, having worked from home for 7 years now, I quickly saw the real value of such a community. While working from home has a lot of great perks, there’s some pretty major downsides, too, like isolation, challenges with productivity, and reduced networking opportunities

My experience at RHRC, running online marketing for a very fast growing ecommerce company and working for the Peace Corps had taught me a lot about grinding it out and making it happen, but I needed to start studying other people’s startup experiences in earnest. That was about 14 months ago and I thought it would be fun and helpful for me, and perhaps others, to start writing about my experience learning about startups. And, hence, here we are.