Early Days

I was born in Las Vegas and grew up mostly on the east side of Vegas where I attended Eldorado High School. I moved to Florence, South Carolina my sophomore year of high school and back to finish at Eldorado and graduated with honors. In high school I took one computer programming class where I was introduced to the Java programming language. I was more interested in sports at this time. I played football and basketball for my schools. Although I had my first real job in high school to buy shoes and clothes, before that I made money on my own. Freshman year was my first experiences into entrepreneurship when I sold candy to classmates. I would have my brother take me to the grocery store before school to buy various candy bars 3 for $1 and I would sell them for $1 each. I executed the business with 300% profit margins and very low expenses. I’m positive there were many other less impressive start-ups ideas in high school, but this is one that I always go back to. More significantly, I remember that I had to start the candy business because I had to pay for dates and presents for my high school girlfriend. Silly high school puppy love right…?

Post High School

After high school I accepted an academic scholarship to go to Kentucky State University for my freshman year of college. KYSU is a historically black University and attending an HBCU was a dream of mine growing up. Attending this university was one of the most valuable experiences I’ve had in life. It emerged me deep into my culture and exposed me to organizations full of intelligent Black people growing together, making a positive impact on their lives and the world, and having A LOT OF FUN! Although I made the dean’s list from my first year grades, I didn’t feel what I was learning was worth paying for higher tuition, room & board, meals, and all of the other expenses that come with sending students to college away from home. In addition to expensive education, I also missed my best friends back home who went to UNLV including that high school girlfriend from the last section. After my freshman year I decided to transfer to be with my friends at UNLV. It is a commuter school so I didn’t need to pay for room & board or meal plans, plus I qualified for other scholarships and grants as long as I kept up my grades. I started dating my high school girlfriend again the next year of college and I focused more on her than I did my education. I let my grades slip pretty bad and ended up losing most of that financial aid. Oh, and I also had to retake quite a few classes. I won’t blame it all on this relationship, I was under the assumption I could breeze through school as I always had and that just simply wasn’t the case in the college of engineering. Also, I worked pretty much full time almost every year at multiple jobs. I had to pay for tuition and support the expensive travel habit I picked up in college. We vacationed dozens of cities, many of them being in foreign countries! After 7 years at UNLV, yes SEVEN YEARS, I graduated with a bachelor of science in Computer Engineering, a minor in Computer Science and a minor in Technology Commercialization. I thought it wouldn’t be a special day because I had dragged it out for so long and didn’t feel worthy of celebration, but finishing and never having to do school again was one of the best feeling I can remember. I was free!

Adult Life

On Cinco De Mayo 2017, I married Danielle Smith who’s been referred to as my ninth grade girlfriend who I actually met in fifth grade. It was the start of a great life for the two of us. We have currently been together for 8 years now and we are happier every year than we were the year before. 8 days after my wedding is when I graduated from UNLV. After our honeymoon and letting the reality of life settle in for a few weeks, I started applying for jobs. I landed a position to work as an Associate Software Engineer for Infosys Ltd. This was the icing on the cake for me because after all of the highs the month before it was scary applying for my first position starting off my professional career. The position was located in Indianapolis, IN and I had to convince my new wife that it was a good idea for us to leave the fast moving desert city to relocate to the snow. That didn’t go over well the first ten times, but my wife has always been my biggest supporter and she allowed me to uproot our lives from our family and everything we knew. I’ve currently spent almost two years working at Infosys and I’ve grown a lot professionally and personally!

Work & Business

I’ve had at least a dozen jobs in my life probably more and I’ve come up with probably just as many business ideas to try to implement. They don’t always come to fruition, but many have. I consider myself a jack of many trades and a master of none, yet. My first, official jobs were working at Macy’s as a salesperson. Recording youth sports at Sportz Filmz. Cashier at Home Depot. Door-to-door sales, selling security systems. Stock room organizing at Abercrombie & Fitch, and inventory person at The Gap. Ride attendant at the Stratosphere. I had at least two paper routes. Specialist at Apple. Interning at Equiinet. I was a server at Bubba Gump and Buffalo Wild Wings. In addition to these “real jobs” I also did side hustle type jobs that I got paid for like playing the piano for my Aunt’s church. Helping a residential contractor with projects. Helping people move. Delivering phonebooks, delivering eviction letters. Helping my grandpa with his paper route. Putting together slideshow videos for people’s parties. Yes, I was all over the place! But I have always been ok with working hard for money and learning whatever is necessary for me to excel in a job. There has got to be a couple that I’ve still left out, but all of these jobs span over a decade and were all before I graduated from college. Many of them overlapped and I had two jobs at a time and most of them were between 2005 and 2012. Between 2012 and my current job I’ve only had two jobs which is good because many jobs value stability. As I get older I try to narrow down the things I’m interested in and when learning, I now try to go deep rather than wide. It is a good change when I consciously dig deep in a single subject like software engineering, but I naturally am interested in many things.

I’ve started working on different business ideas over the more recent years. I feel like you have to fail at things, or at least execute your best hoping for the highest result. But without the first iterations, we aren’t able to achieve ideal goals. My first business was Hunt For Gifts, a not-for-profit scavenger hunt. Teams paid to enter a super fun and competitive scavenger hunt we held on the Las Vegas Strip for 4 years straight in mid December. We used 100% of the revenue generated from the event and donated from supporters and some of our own money to purchase gifts for under-privileged kids in our city during the holidays. We grew in the number of teams and amount of money donated outside the event every single year. My wife and I are considering bringing this event back and making it more official by creating a 501c3 and creating more year round events to help raise money and make a difference in more ways. The next most notable business was Indy’s Indoor Bark Park, an obvious name for a place where people can bring their dogs inside to play with other people and dogs. We did dog birthday parties, many other events and sold retail and beer and many services. This business was a lot of fun and a lot of work. We were opened for about 7 months and there was another 4-5 months of planning that went into it before opening. We unfortunately had to close the business, but this was one of the best experiences I’ve had with respect to going towards my goals in life and the amount that I learned from it. We did close to $70k in sales since the inception of the business, but we didn’t quite ever make it to become profitable. We grew the business at rapid speed in the winter time and it continuously grew throughout the year and would have made it to profitable if we were to stay open through to the next busy season.