The Beginning.Homeless to High-Tech.

This is my first blog ever, I keep thinking I have a ton of ideas for working with early businesses or VCs looking for civic minded business ideas that drive business success from one simple idea: That if you create ideas that can be transformed into a product that are not only good for the world but profitable as well, you can accomplish something our founding fathers would have been proud of. and it is positioned in the marketplace correctly, that people will want to give you their business instead of having to ask for it.

So how and why is this here? Well, for starters not many techies in Silicon Valley started out as homeless teenagers. So I realize I have a point of view that isn’t covered by the normal technical people that live in this vast land of wealth and riches. I was a homeless teenager for about 2 years in Washington DC. I started a tech business specializing in inner city and community based non-profits and some civic minded for profits companies to get myself off the streets.

All I had to do was go into the non-profits that were helping me eat and trying to find a job and making them realize that if I got a real job, they couldn’t keep asking me for help fixing their computers. Companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, and dozens of other startups would come in with “gifts” of computers and taking paper sign ups and filing systems and turning it all into databases for the NPOs. Problem is, back then, no one really thought about the idea of continuing support costs. Continuing and rising costs of storage of long term backups, etc. The companies got their stories in the paper and got their PR out of their donation, not to mention the tax write-off for everything anyway. Each company, one by one, was life high and dry without the ability to pay for the early 1990's tech bubble prices. Where it was not uncommon for some of the guys out there to be charging $350/hr for tech support.

So I wrote up a contract one night. And the next day took it to each Executive Director and said in the contract that my price was 50% of whatever their other contract stated maintenance fee hourly rates were.

It worked.

Within the week I had a full billet of work, but now needed a team and resources in order to have days off and to actually make it with things like tools, computers, laptops, email servers, etc. All stuff you needed to buy to have on your own back then. You really couldn’t start a tech company off and do things like buy and create a monitoring system with a server when your credit has been destroyed by being homeless for 2 years prior. Not to mention your still on the streets. And no banks, or anyone else for that matter, want to help you borrow money with a promise you’ll pay them back when your homeless. Yet somehow, I had a full plate of consulting fees coming in. After a while I ended up having to ask one of the Executive Directors to go down to their bank and advise the bank that I had indeed earned the money in the checks that were piling up and that I was in need of an account. FINALLY! It wasn’t over yet though.

I had somewhere between $10,000-20,000 in checks and no bank would open up an account for me. Between being homeless and now having horrible credit, what bank actually thought I was supposed to have a collection of checks totaling that much when it was obvious I didn’t even have a place to sleep that was indoors other than my car?

This was before the days of micro-financing and private internet lending. Man do I wish they existed back then for me, but lacking the ability to turn back time, I’m ecstatic that there is a way around the stronghold and colluded monopoly that the traditional banking system had functionally been just given by the government and unlike other monopolies. Since they SAY they had competition but by just colluding and not completely buying each other out when the huge consolidation of the banking industry happened in the early to mid-1990's, they had no regulatory system overseeing their policies either.

So instead I merged my clients with another non-profit specialization tech company and became their 4th employee. It worked out great for a few years, but I realized I had a lot of other talents and I wanted to see how they worked out while I was still young and had nothing, so I had nothing to loose! (or so I thought)

I eventually landed in a high-end grassroots lobbying job and got official exposure to the political world I was living in and around by living in Eastern Market area in DC. It is the neighborhood that surrounds Congress and the congressional administrative buildings where all of the real work on The Hill is done by the staffers of those offices. Earlier, I had often found myself as a homeless teen playing golf on Andrews Air Force Base (where it was cheap for dependents like myself) and found I could hold my own not only on the course, but in our talks about world politics and how to solve urban and cultural problems we were experiencing in DC and abroad with Senators and Congressmen, 4 Star military generals, and political staffers on the hill. I got confidence in my ability to see into political, military and civil matters from this experience.

With the background in being homeless, tech and politics I have been coming up with ideas on how to think outside the box from having lived it instead of just reading about things like being homeless literally overnight after having a terrific high school education and middle class upbringing that now looking back, I realize that my high school was better than most college educations. Never getting to go to college but wishing I had both MBA and CS degrees, I would have been torn which to get anyway and may have created a career of academia caught in that quagmire. Which is a nightmare in my world being caught in a lifetime of classrooms, and realized I couldn’t afford it without my families help anyway. So college was out, entrepreneurship was in. So off I went, again.

So on with a tech career I went, but when in public with friends or strangers I was just meeting, usually never bringing up tech in a conversation but having instead conversations about how to solve political problems of local and national policies. This is the exception of course when they intersected on the topics like data-mining and what kind of social controls would be put in place when the Internet became a household item, those policies and where they will end up and how they would end us. Most thought it was crazy that you could control something so vast. The Snowden leaks have proven that those apples didn’t have to fall far from the tree for the potential for the value of data to be realized.

So lately I have been inspired to write down the business plans that have been on my mind lately first, and have already started writing two on this blog. I’ll publish them when they have more meat on their bones, but I’m not looking for finished products for now and since they are for public consumption, I’m hoping to get public feedback on the problems that need to be addressed in them to make them work. That or other ideas that would marry well to these to get better results for both. I want them to be out there for people to use, and meanwhile, I need to get used to writing so I’m going to start analyzing local politics in the San Francisco and the Bay Area since that’s where I live, and some national political logistical hurdles that America faces today. I also plan on starting to write up teasers for my other business plans once these get going, and the ones that I get the most responses from will be the ones I spend the most time writing up, working out kinks and questions for those who may have an interest in running with them.

Oh, and I care about the issues currently destroying the gay community. More written on that here: https://medium.com/civic-business-plans-and-solutions-for-a-better/5c1ccf59745c