In the Beginning

I have been asked a number of times why I was motivated to start this business. After some reflection, I’ve concluded that it’s a combination of a two different factors: one altruistic, and the other not so much. At the risk of sounding self-important, I sometimes fantasize about the answers I would give if I were ever invited onto one of the many business podcasts I frequently consume. When asked why I decided to take the leap, I would struggle to decide between two distinct versions of my story. One would sound great on a politically-correct platform; full of passion, conscientiousness and determination. The other doesn’t fit in so well with the kinds of motivating factors that are typically considered acceptable. In reality, it’s likely a combination of both, with each side contributing to the forward momentum in its own way at exactly the right time. So what are these two reasons, and why did their unnatural balance push me forward with so much force?

Let’s start with the lighter side. When I was a teenager, I was desperately interested in how things worked. I would fantasize about lifting the veil on the inner workings of the various appliances I found around my house. Only when one of these items broke was I lucky enough to inherit their remains for an exploratory dissection. However, I often found myself staring at the constituent components, having completely disassembled whatever it was that I got my hands on, having no idea what I was looking at. A feeling of disappointment would wash over me as I realized that I didn’t have the knowledge to repurpose any of those components in a meaningful way. And so they would accumulate in various small containers around my room, unlabeled because I didn’t know their name or function. Sometimes I would find myself distracted from my schoolwork by rifling through the small bins, looking for anything that I could piece together into something new. This was often fruitless, and the most impressive result I ever achieved was making a small motor turn (likely pulled from the vibration mechanism of a console controller) with a rechargeable battery that I undoubtedly found in a broken wireless speaker. I remember feeling inspired to learn about how these things worked, and