How I actually got into startups and programming

This week I was saddened to hear of the passing of Dave Mirra, a BMX legend that I grew up idolizing on TV, in magazines, and VHS as he pushed the limits of action sports and BMX during the peak of the X-Games craze.

It got me thinking about how much the action sports scene shaped my life and career, and people like Dave had a much bigger impact on me than I’ve ever given them credit for. It might seem silly if you weren’t part of the scene, but I hope to shed some light on why it was, and still is, so special.

People often ask me how I got into entrepreneurship and programming, and I usually give a pretty boring answer about how I wanted to be my own boss, liked building things on the computer, just fell into it, and so on and so forth. For the longest time I couldn’t remember any one reason why I got into any of this stuff except for blind luck.

However, this week it all came back. I remembered that I was drawn to those pursuits in large part because of the individualistic and creative spirit pervasive in the action sports community that I was so enthralled with as a young adult. In many ways, it was because of this community that I got into programming and startups.

Growing up, my friends were skateboarders, inline skaters, and BMX bikers. Frankly, people my parents probably wished I didn’t want to hang out with. It certainly wasn’t a group of grade-A students playing by life’s rules. These were individuals straight to the bone, and I fit right in.

I spent hours hanging out downtown and at skate parks “sessioning” spots, doing tricks, and generally causing ruckus (and probably getting the best exercise of my life!). I explored new parts of the city, pushed the limits of what I thought I could handle, and learned how to document our adventures through video and photos along the way.

One of the most fascinating things about this community was how individualistic and entrepreneurial it was. Everywhere I looked someone was starting a company or project. Whether it was a new fashion brand, a skate parts company, a band, an online mag, or a social network for the various “crews,” it seemed everyone was creating something of their own for the world. In the inline skate world, I looked up to people like Dustin Latimer and Brian Shima that were getting entire new product lines mass-produced for very receptive niche markets in the face of embedded outdoor sports players like Salomon. They were building and launching successful hardware startups before Kickstarter made it cool and kids were seen rocking their swag wherever I went.

After a while, I got the itch to add my own touch to this world, and I built a few websites for my skate friends complete with image galleries, forums, and interactive flash videos to share our adventures with the world. Over time my websites got more complex, adding PHP for blog features, web hosting, and more. This is when I learned Linux to run my own web server at home off of a 500mz Gateway Pentium III on my parent’s DSL connection because I couldn’t afford to pay for a dedicated server that would give me root access and VPS hadn’t been invented yet.

Eventually, my friends and I had what we now fondly refer to as “Facebook before Facebook”: A powerful online watering hole for my friends and friends-of-friends. That’s where I really cut my teeth as a programmer and product creator as I iterated based on the demands of a passionate and opinionated user base. That’s where it all started.

All of this was pre-startup craze (as we know it today, 2000’s excluded) and was so far away from the institutionalized startup and tech world we all know today, yet mirrors it an incredibly uncanny way.

With Dave’s passing, I realize how my heart and soul is still in that world. How I can relate more to him and my old skate idols than I can to many of the people in the tech and startup world today. How I’m lucky to have been able to spend time breaking the rules with kids that didn’t fit in, even if my parents would have rathered I didn’t.

In startups, I think founders have lost a bit of that “fuck you” attitude that I loved so much from the action sports community. Running a company is really hard. You need to believe in yourself, to be confident enough as an individual to put your touch on the world even if people don’t “get” it at first. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today if I let all the naysayers convince me to give up and follow their rules. I would never have taken the risk to start my own thing if I needed validation from a job.

I’ve never met Dave and I won’t begin to pretend I know what kind of demons he was battling with. That being said, I know how hard it is to be an individual and a loner and to follow your own path. If you know that, too, then know you’re not alone.

RIP Dave, and thanks for showing me as a kid that there was a world of creative pursuit outside of the traditional confines of society, and that it’s okay, nay awesome, to follow the beat of your own drum.