Wexford (1998)

At the age of 12, the subdivision that my parents live in started deciding to cut back on its newsletter from monthly to bimonthly – as it faced the dot com advertising bubble and was potentially losing advertisers.  I saw this as a huge market and so pitched the board of directors and wrote up a contract that had me managing, hosting, and producing our neighborhood’s website. I was a market maker for new ideas. It also gave me the pride and ability to provide high speed internet at my house (before cheap hosting was really quick available) and work with businesses to provide some advertising.

Elgia Inc. (2001)

Wexford

Working for Wexford gave me a great story as I started high school, especially when I met Stacey Scott (a neighbor) by doing yard work for her and she heard that I worked on the neighborhood website and was interested in computers. I was the 4th employee at Elgia Inc. a provider of technical support for AT&T’s Webmeeting (based on Webex) This was empowering, as I got to learn to actually program in PHP and work with databases while supporting C level executives at a young age of 16 – But also because I was able to get my friends working with me as well – at one point 4 other people from middle / high school were hired almost directly because of my success. If you used AT&T’s Executive Web Conference software, that was programmed by high schoolers (and done very professionally at that)

ItsMedia (2006)

ItsMEdia

It’sMEdia was another project by Ms. Scott that was based on capturing the burgeoning HD Video on the internet craze. (Which in the perspective of youtube not going HD until late 2009 makes it really high tech) It started with Tennis and Gymnastics with local teams and crews exploring different ideas from motion capture (stroMotion.)

It was a ground up system involving some great new technologies. We used clustering, our own version of cloud computing (unmetered bandwidth vs. metered dedicated box) and worked with the newly released and just becoming popular h264 and mpeg4 video technologies.

Something else that few people have gotten to do is work abroad with their business. In 2006 our big make or break moment was when we went to the People to People Youth Sports events in Vienna Austria and Amsterdam, Netherlands.  Sure they were 100+ hour weeks, but definitely experiences.

GiftedSoft

GiftedSoft

In 2001, my good friend, Brian Fagan and I learned how to program, both at work, and with our school’s talented and gifted departments. Directed studies allowed us to learn how to produce an application that actively saved teachers hundreds of hours each semester and made a complex process both simple and engaging for students and teachers.

In college, I continued to support my Alma mater (Roswell High School) by continuing volunteering and consulting for them. There was a product rewrite in 2010 and I also sought the TAG Business Launch funding, but lacked confidence in the market (Metro area gifted departments) as the state declared drastic educational budget cuts.

Others

I originally worked on the business model and technology behind StarvingFreelancers.com - an artistic freelancing web site in a similar sphere as CarbonMade. My own issues with the job market at the time (2009) had me doubting its incredible success.

TodaysBracket.com was a Startup Weekend Atlanta idea of a web entertainment game of bracketology – a bracket system for your favorite Simpsons character or favorite Startup Weekend company. I’m extremely proud of our progress in one weekend as our business development team went and sold advertising and received a letter of intent.  Our alpha product was a success as StartupWeekend was successfully bracketed [though I massaged the database some]

FandomU is a company by Chris Stuckey that got accepted into the Microsoft Azure Incubation Program in 2010 and needed more developers, so I jumped right in.