For a long time I tried to run from my past, ashamed of growing up poor, embarrassed of my learning disabilities, damaged and broken by an often unforgiving world.
However, over the last few years, with the help of a loving and supportive family, my journey of introspection has led me to understand that it is our experiences, all of them, the good and the bad, that make us who we are.
​
Below is a small window into my journey. I hope that you find it encouraging. The journey to self-actualization, reaching our full potential, requires self-love, and that begins with self-awareness and self-acceptance.
My Story
In My Words
My Story
​Early childhood ​I grew up as a poor kid in rural Kentucky, raised by divorced parents. My mom was a nurse, and my dad was a used car salesman. We moved around a lot for financial reasons, sometimes two or three times in a single year. By the time I graduated high school, I had attended close to 20 schools. As a child, I remember filling water buckets from a spring and bathing in the creek. Eventually, my stepdad built a bathtub out of plywood behind the house, and installed a septic system so that we could have flushing toilets. However, months later, the school sent the health department to our home to investigate why we all kept getting sick. That's when they discovered that my stepdad had built the septic drainage field too close to the spring. Some people called us rednecks, but I always identified more as a hillbilly. From the beginning, I was an extremely hyperactive kid. Long before the term ADHD even existed, my mom did her nursing degree dissertation on hyperactivity, and was ultimately convinced that I had a dairy allergy that was causing my hyperactivity. For a significant portion of my early childhood, my mom forbade me from consuming milk and milk products. When my siblings ate ice cream, I ate sherbet. When they had cereal with whole vitamin D milk, I had Carnation dehydrated milk out of a box. My dad never enforced the dietary restrictions, so on weekends, it was all sugar and milk for me. The on-again, off-again milk restriction did little to help with my hyperactivity. By the third grade, a combination of severe behavioral issues at school and a fairly advanced case of undiagnosed dyslexia forced me to repeat the third grade. For my second attempt, I was placed in the LD (learning disabled) program, although my specific learning disability was still undiagnosed at the time. Even at that early age, there was already a stigma. We were the kids who met in the back of the school in a little room up a rickety staircase. Some of the kids wore padded helmets. I knew I didn't belong there, and my frustration led to more outbursts of anger, which only hurt my case. At the age of 12, I moved to Pennsylvania with my dad. It was there, in the seventh grade, that I was finally diagnosed with dyslexia and put into a program that allowed me to attend regular classes but get special help on the side. To help with my extreme hyperactivity, I was assigned two gym classes a day, it helped tire me out, but did little for my attention deficit disorder. I never became a great student, but I did learn to read, and was particularly good at creative writing and history.
My first business It was also at the age of 12 that I got my first taste of being an entrepreneur. One day, I saw a "Help Wanted" sign for the local newspaper looking for paperboys. I called and signed up without even talking to my dad about it. I remember that day vividly. This old Pennsylvania Dutch guy showed up at the house wearing a suit and tie and a gray fedora. He told me how being a paperboy meant owning your own business. The newspaper would sell me the newspapers at a wholesale rate, and then I would resell them to my customers at a set list price. The margins and the tips were mine to keep. It was probably one of the most defining moments of my late childhood. I kept that paper route for four years. Recently, my dad said to me, "Do you know how many times I had to wake you up for you to go do your paper route?" I told him I didn't. He said, "None. Never once did I have to wake you up. You got up every day at 6 AM and delivered papers before the sun was even up." That job changed my life quite literally. It was the first time I had my own money to spend. For me, it was not about material things, but I quickly discovered that money meant freedom. Growing up poor, I had grown accustomed to wearing hand-me-downs and secondhand clothes. I was used to not being able to do things that other kids did. With my paper route came the freedom to dress the way I wanted to dress, go to the movies I wanted to see, listen to the music I wanted to hear, and even eat the food I wanted to eat. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life. $400 a month changed everything for me. I quickly learned the very direct correlation between how hard I worked and how much money I earned, and that with more money came more freedom.
Jack of all trades By 16, I was working two or three part-time jobs at a time. I worked at a steak and sub shop, washed dishes at the country club, worked at a Yakko's Hotdog King serving up hotdogs and pierogies, picked corn, bussed tables, waited tables, and worked as a contractor's apprentice building decks in the summer. All the while, I helped my dad with his business too. Though I was a varsity athlete (track and wrestling), college seemed an unlikely option based on my consistently poor academic performance. So, I pre-enlisted in the US Army as a junior in high school. Pre-enlisting meant I would finish out my senior year and then, after graduation, head straight to basic training. Pre-enlisting also meant I got to pick my MOS (Military Occupational Specialty, or job) and my first duty station. I chose the Army's Airborne Ranger Program at Fort Bragg. My senior year of high school, I suffered a febrile seizure and was hospitalized. The seizure meant I was barred from military enlistment for 7 years. The exact cause of the seizure would not be discovered for another 14 years, ironically, in a military hospital on the border of Iraq. That same year, I entered and won a creative writing competition with one of my short stories. The prize was a partial scholarship to Eugene Lang College in Greenwich Village, NY. While ultimately, I could not come up with the rest of the funds needed to attend, it did convince me that college might be an option after all. For my first couple of years after high school, I just drifted, working a mix of full- and part-time jobs and taking a few classes here and there at the local university. By the time I was 20, I had added parking cars, pumping gas at a marina, stripping telegrams, and working at McDonald's to my resume. Then, at 21 years old, I landed my first job in the tech industry. I started selling computers at a national computer retail outlet called Compuadd.
Computers and kitchens While working at Compuadd, I started my own computer consulting business called Ideas & Solutions, Inc. with a core service offering of computer, peripheral, and network setup. This was in 1991, the early days of personal computers. At Compuadd, we were selling desktop computers with Intel's 486 chip (33 MHz), 16 GB hard drive, 4 MB RAM, and a dial-up modem, which we bundled with the online service Prodigy. Every customer I sold a computer to also got my business card. It was a nice side hustle and reinforced the connection between customer service and profitability. My next two jobs were also in the computer industry. One was providing helpdesk support to sales reps for a new line of laptops at Brown Foreman, and the other was working for a company that rented personal computers. In 1992, my brother and I started our own BBS (Bulletin Board System) with a $5,000 investment from a friend. We charged a monthly service fee and provided members with access to a national online community and an assortment of ASCII games. However, in 1993, I experienced market disruption firsthand when CERN made the "web" protocol free, ushering in the World Wide Web. Bulletin boards quickly became obsolete and over the next year, our business gradually fizzled out. We eventually closed the business in 1994. Around that time, my dad asked me to help him with his kitchen remodeling business. He was struggling to grow the business, so I became a 50/50 partner and took out a small business loan. We launched an aggressive marketing campaign and within a year, we had gone from one or two kitchens per month to three or four kitchens per week. We invested everything back into the business, buying better equipment, hiring more staff, and expanding our shop and showroom. However, in 1995, the market took a slight downturn. Although it wasn't a significant decline, we had invested all of our profits back into the business and had no capital reserves. This meant that what should have been just a slow year with a small loss ended up devastating our business. Creditors called in their debt, suppliers cut us off for unpaid bills, and the IRS came looking for taxes we owed but didn't have because we chose to pay our employees their December paycheck with withholding taxes instead of laying them off before Christmas. It was my first real business failure, one that took me years to recover from financially. My first child was born that year and we had no health insurance because we were covered by the kitchen business. The debt and lawsuits piled up. My dad left the country for Jamaica. I was 25 years old, had just graduated from college, had a newborn baby, a part-time job, $60,000 in back taxes, and no real assets. I swore off entrepreneurship altogether, took a full-time job working with high school students, and moved from Kentucky to Louisiana.
Real estate and video games Though I was still recovering from the failure of my kitchen remodeling business, I quickly started another venture. My next project was a print magazine called FSBO (For Sale By Owner) In Lafayette. However, the company didn't last long. Without enough capital and bad credit, I couldn't invest in the marketing needed for a first-mover. The business was a flop. In 1997, I was working full-time with high school students and would often invite them to our small apartment to play video games on my N64. It was then that I had the idea of starting a national console-based video game tournament. At the time, the only competitive console tournament was for Madden Football. With three major consoles on the market and thousands of popular games, I believed there was a significant unmet demand. I partnered with a friend and with a $60k investment from his dad, we started The V Games. We spent months pitching the idea to the video game industry and eventually secured support from Ziff Davis, the video game magazine publisher, and Babbage's, one of the largest video game retailers in the country. However, my friend had quit his job as a CPA and was paying himself through the new business, so we soon ran out of money and had to shut down before hosting a single tournament. In 1998, I had two children, a pile of debt, and was earning $28k a year working for a non-profit that sometimes couldn't pay me my salary. We survived thanks to the generosity of friends who gave us a minivan when our car broke down, provided free legal services when we had to sue our apartment complex over a severe roach infestation, and even helped us pay our unpaid bills. I was grateful for the help but also resentful that I needed it. I decided to leave youth work and try something completely different. I didn't want to start another business; I wanted to do something entirely new. So, I decided to re-enlist in the US Army with the long-term plan of becoming a counterintelligence special agent for the FBI or the CIA. This sudden change in direction surprised my spouse, friends, and family, and they wondered if I was okay.
Fighting terrorists Though I had a college degree in history, I chose to enlist in the Army instead of becoming an officer through the Green to Gold program. By enlisting with a degree, I was able to pick my MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) and duty station. I chose to become a 97B, a Counterintelligence Special Agent. In early 1999, I completed my training at Fort Huachuca's Military Intelligence School and Airborne Jump School. My first duty station was the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, where I worked in the G2 (intelligence) unit. That year, I also started working on my master's degree in global security with a concentration in counterterrorism. I applied and was accepted to Officer Candidate School (OCS) with the hope of being assigned to the intelligence corps as a counterintelligence officer. My last official duty at Fort Bragg was to help develop the Fort Bragg Terrorism Threat Response Plan. In June 2001, I left Fort Bragg, my spouse, and children to go to Fort Benning, GA. Ten weeks into the twelve-week OCS program, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. This changed everything. As a counterintelligence agent with master's work in counterterrorism, I was suddenly in high demand. I was commissioned as an Army intelligence officer after completing OCS. However, I was technically a 35C, an all-source intelligence officer, but what I wanted was to be a 35E, a counterintelligence officer. I went to the post commander and made my case. He said I couldn't specialize and become a 35E until I reached the rank of captain (I was still a second lieutenant), but that would be three years away. I argued that since I had already completed the Army's counterintelligence training, had my badge and credentials, and was finishing my master's in counterterrorism, I was hoping for an exception. The general looked over my papers, signed them, and handed them back to me. "Congratulations," he said. "You are the Army's first-ever 35E lieutenant. Now pack your DCUs (desert camouflage uniform) because you're headed to Afghanistan." For the next two years, I deployed with the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade (Vigilant Knights) out of Fort Gordon, GA. As the XO (executive officer) of a counterintelligence unit, I was responsible for managing HUMINT (human intelligence) teams in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the Middle East as part of Operation Enduring Freedom. The work was everything I had dreamed of and more. Our job was to establish human sources that could provide intelligence on past or potential acts of terrorism against US persons or property. We worked 18-hour days, week after week and month after month. Since I worked mostly undercover, no one knew that I was still just a lieutenant, so I was sometimes tasked to run military operations that exceeded my rank. In 2002, I was named special projects officer and was asked by the Kuwait CIA Chief of Station to help lead several high-profile counterterrorism investigations. During one of those investigations, I came face to face with one of Osama Bin Laden's lieutenants, though we didn't know his true identity until we linked his alias to Bin Laden using intelligence from the NSA. We used the intelligence we had gathered to shut down an Al Qaeda finance cell operating out of Kuwait City. That investigation must have caught someone's attention because a few weeks later, two agents from a top-secret unit visited me and asked if I would be interested in going under deep cover on a prolonged mission in a hostile country I would have no contact with my military unit or my family for up to a year. I immediately agreed and was told to be prepared to leave on a days’ notice.
I survived… barely As I waited for that mysterious deployment, I continued working on my other investigations. It was during this time that an unexpected set of circumstances during a meeting with a source forced me to seek emergency medical attention. Since I sometimes worked undercover, I couldn't risk visiting the local hospital in Kuwait City. One of my colleagues drove me up to Camp Udairi on the Iraq border, where I became the first surgical patient of the 86th CSH (Combat Support Hospital) deployed in support of Iraqi Freedom. Unfortunately, there were severe complications during surgery. I survived thanks to the heroic effort of the CSH team and a very astute anesthesiologist. I was packed in ice and medevacked to Kuwait Airfield via Blackhawk. From there, I was transferred to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where I remained on a respirator in an induced coma for several weeks. I was eventually taken off life support and moved from the ICU. I spent another month in Landstuhl before being sent home. While still in Germany, I was told that due to the extent of my injuries, I would be medically retired from the military. I came home broken. I weighed under 120 lbs., 35 pounds less than before being hospitalized. My speech was sometimes slurred, and I showed signs of cognitive decline, often finding it difficult to communicate. I had permanent nerve damage that forced me to walk with a cane. But that was just the physical. The mental and emotional trauma ran even deeper. My unit was still fighting terrorists and putting their lives on the line, and I was helpless to do anything. My family felt like strangers to me. My third child had been born just before my deployment. When I left, she was a newborn. When I came home, she was a toddler. The other two kids barely recognized me, a shadow of the man they knew as their father. I was angry, depressed, and lost. My marriage never fully recovered, and we eventually divorced. I was completely unaware of the extent of my PTSD and how much it was affecting every aspect of my life. Since my dream of working for the CIA was no longer possible, I had to figure out what to do next. Side bar: I later discovered that the seizure I had in high school that had prevented me from enlisting in the Army was actually the result of a rare genetic condition called Malignant Hyperthermia. It was this undiagnosed latent genetic condition that led to the surgical complications.
My first successful exit… sort of It was almost a year before I could walk and talk normally again, but that did little to slow me down. In that first year after returning from the war, I decided to try relaunching the V-Games, my previous startup attempt from back in 1998. I reached out to my old business partner, and before long, we were back in business. A lot had changed in the video game industry in those six years. Babbage's had been acquired by GameStop, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft had all launched new consoles, and the competitive PC gaming market had taken off. However, there was still no national console video game tournament. I started by reaching out to the contacts I had made in our previous attempt. Surprisingly, most of them were still around and much more eager to discuss the idea. The industry had changed, competition was tighter, so everyone was looking for any small edge they could get. My contact from Babbage's had survived the GameStop acquisition and agreed to sponsor a 30-city video game console tournament. Ziff Davis agreed to come on as our media sponsor, providing us ad space in a number of their print and online publications. Numerous other sponsors joined in after that, including Logitech, Sony, Gamefly, THC, and even the MLB. Before long, we had designed and built a mobile arena and started hosting tournaments in malls across the country. We had a crew that transported all the equipment from city to city and ran the events. At first, our turnout was small, generally under 100 people. But as the tour went on, it gathered momentum, and before long, we were hosting tournaments with over 300 people. The tournament included all three major consoles (PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Game Cube) and included the titles Halo, Tony Hawk's Underground, Grand Turismo, Super Smash Bros, SSX3, Soul Caliber, and others. By the time we reached our 20th city, we had started to plan for our next big tour, a massive 500-event college campus tournament that would also include PC games. Our tournament had turned from a buzz to a roar as people of all ages lined up at our events for a chance to compete. Then the hammer fell. We received a cease and desist letter from ESPN claiming we were violating their X Games trademark. I reached out to a local intellectual property attorney for advice. His position was that our case could be won and that it would be a stretch for ESPN to convince a judge that V-Games was somehow in direct competition with the X Games. However, he added that ESPN had much deeper pockets and that defending the litigation could cost us tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Serendipitously, around that same time, I received an offer to acquire the company. Competitive gaming had taken off, and we were considered first-movers in the space with amazing sponsors and a huge customer base. Facing a very expensive rebranding or an equally expensive legal battle, I decided it was time to sell. I was still carrying a mountain of debt, having financed most of the company on personal credit cards. Once I informed the potential acquirer about the ESPN cease and desist letter, they knocked a zero off the acquisition price but kept the offer on the table. It was a tough call, but I didn't have the stomach for a fight with a giant or the hassle of starting from scratch with a new brand. I took the money, paid off my debt and put what little was left in savings for my next startup.
Leveraging what I learned from Uncle Sam I made the decision to return to school to earn my MBA. As I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do, I thought an MBA would provide me with a strong foundation for a successful career. It was during my MBA program that I first learned about the business discipline of competitive intelligence. While competitive intelligence (CI) is a complex process used by many large companies, what particularly interested me at the time was primary research. The goal of competitive intelligence-based primary research is to gather intelligence directly from competitors and their stakeholders. With my background in HUMINT (Human Intelligence) operations, I was confident that this was something I could excel at. I was proven right. Over the next year, I worked for several competitive intelligence firms in both full-time and contract capacities, quickly earning a reputation as the go-to person for getting intelligence that others could not. I will admit that at the time, I was very focused on the tactical aspects of the trade, providing my clients with raw intelligence that I had gathered from various competitor sources. There was very little analysis or insights involved in my work. Over time, however, I began to understand that the role I was filling was only a small part of the competitive intelligence puzzle, so I started taking classes and reading everything I could on business strategy. In 2006, after working in the industry for just over 18 months, I launched my own competitive intelligence firm, Sedulo Group. For the first two years, I was a solo practitioner, mostly doing subcontract work for other CI firms. But that was about to change.
Two strategic investigations In 2007, I started to work directly with my own clients instead of subcontracting. This allowed me to take on two major projects that I was uniquely qualified to handle. The first was a strategic research project for a major US transportation company that believed it was being targeted for a hostile takeover. I was hired to determine the validity of the threat and gather intelligence that could be used to block the takeover. The project lasted six months and involved research in multiple countries. I was able to prove that a hostile takeover was indeed in the works, backed by a UK venture capital fund with ties to a Russian oligarchy. This information allowed my client to block the takeover, since it would have given control of a strategic US resource to a foreign entity, which was prohibited by law. The second project was for a leading global life science company that suspected it was being targeted by a competitive intelligence company that was conducting research illegally. I was hired to find out who was conducting the research, what CI firm they worked for, and what pharmaceutical company the CI firm was hired by. After four months of research, I was able to identify the individual researcher and elicit a confession from him. The confession revealed that the researcher was a contractor and that the CI firm was unaware of the illegal techniques he was using. While I also identified the pharmaceutical company that had hired the CI firm, the evidence showed that they were not aware of any illegal activity being conducted on their behalf. My client issued cease and desist letters and the issue was resolved. The fees from these two strategic investigations were more than four times my annual salary, and since I had no overhead, it was all profit. This convinced me to double down on my consulting firm, so I hired a Director of Business Development and increased our marketing efforts.
Too little, too early While working on those two strategic investigations, I was also developing a tech startup called VUZE.TV. It was 2007, and YouTube was still mostly made up of low-quality user-generated content. Netflix was about to start its streaming service, and many major networks had started to port their made-for-TV content to the internet. However, there was no one producing high-quality made-for-streaming content at scale. VUZE.TV aimed to fill that gap. We began developing our own proprietary media player that included technology to enable us to overlay interactive hotspots that users could interact with. We also started working on a lineup of made-for-streaming content that was of higher quality than YouTube but not as high-budget as cable TV. Our goal was to leverage product placement within the content that users could interact with through the hotspots. If a user saw a chair they liked in one of our webisodes, they could click on it and be directed to the manufacturer's website. At one point, we had over a dozen show concepts fully developed and had gone into preproduction on three of them. With a staff of almost 20 people, I knew I would need to raise funds for the venture. I spent the next six months trying to raise money from angel and venture capital investors. It was a frustrating experience. Even the more tech-savvy investors were not convinced that streaming was the future. After one of my VC pitches, the Managing Partner leaned back in his chair and asked, "So, you think people are going to watch TV on their computers?" They decided not to invest. Having run out of patience trying to raise money for what I believed was a true unicorn, I closed the business down to focus on running my successful CI firm. I swore off ever chasing VC money again, a commitment I have kept to this day.
Innovation for Impact In 2008, I completed a research project for a pharmaceutical company that was interested in entering the childhood EPI vaccine market. Through my work, I met with several major humanitarian organizations, including UNICEF, WHO, PAHO, and the Gates Foundation. I learned that one of the major challenges with childhood vaccines in many countries is the lack of vaccination tracking. Most countries still relied on paper vaccine cards, which can be difficult to maintain in some conditions. I thought there must be a better solution, and I came up with the idea of using biometric technology to provide a portable vaccination record for children. I assembled a team of talented technologists who left their high-paying jobs to work on the project with me. In 2009, we conducted a feasibility study in Southern Sudan, which confirmed the need for our technology. With funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, we were able to develop the necessary technology and deploy it in Benin, Africa, and Nepal. In 2012, our organization received the coveted Changemaker designation from Ashoka, and in 2015, we merged with another nonprofit to continue our mission of improving immunization in developing countries.
Tying it all together Over the next few years, Sedulo Group continued to experience tremendous growth and was recognized by Inc Magazine as the fastest growing consulting firm in North America. During this time, I launched several additional startups, some of which provided complementary services to Sedulo and its clients, reducing the need to raise money through a shared sales pipeline and service synergies. While some of these startups didn't succeed, others went on to become successful companies that are still around today. In 2014, I introduced my first strategic framework, What’s After Next, at Stanford University, where I had recently completed some post-graduate work. Since then, I have used the What’s After Next framework to support the innovation roadmap for some of the leading life science and technology companies in the world. Following the successful rollout of What’s After Next, I continued to develop additional strategic frameworks to address a range of topics from digital transformation to Go-To-Market strategies. After a long and sometimes difficult career in startups, I was able to combine everything I had learned over 30 years to launch my own startup studio, Hyperactive Ventures, in 2020. Applying the various strategic frameworks I had used to help Sedulo’s clients generate over $5B in innovation-driven revenue, Hyperactive Ventures has successfully launched several startups and has nearly a dozen companies in the concept development and due diligence phase.
