I was born the middle of three brothers. On top of that, I'm the shortest. My wife tells me "that explains a lot", but I'm not really sure what she's talking about. See, this whole career thing kinda happened by accident; I had aspired to camp out on the beach and make short films for the rest of my life. I still haven't managed to make that happen! I had gotten into digital media–mostly as a curiosity–when I was in college; these newfangled tools like Adobe Creative Suite (a chunk of which was "Macromedia" back in those days) made my presentations a lot more fun to make, and possibly more fun to watch. After college, I spent a few years working for The Man, but only up until 2008, when the market crashed and I lost my job. Turns out that The Man was a lot less reliable than my elders had let on. Or maybe I was a lousy employee, dunno, but I had a young family to support, so I started freelancing websites to get by. Next thing you know, I was running this little boutique interactive firm in Texas, which paid the bills and was interesting work. Sometime in 2015, I got introduced to this smart, friendly guy who wanted to start a solar business, which was his professional background. Solar was a small, nascent industry in Houston at the time; grid power was cheap, panels were expensive, and Texans loved burning oil. But the data showed that grid parity was on its way, and he believed that better tech and better marketing would mean a better solar company with lower costs. All I knew about solar was that it was really cool, and better for the planet, which was kind of all I needed to jump right in. So we partnered up, and my team and I started building some rad tools to run the solar business better. Since taking the plunge into PV, my team and I have gotten to know the residential solar industry pretty well. We've felt the pain points at every step of the delivery, and developed innovative tools to alleviate them. We've pivoted our focus as consultants, shifting our book of business almost entirely into renewables. And we've spun up a new organization of our own, with an objective to streamline the residential solar delivery with beautiful software that's actually a joy to use. Things are chugging right along! I've always been hesitant to assert that my career was actually "making the the world a better place". At best, I guess I hoped to "do well by doing good", and to earn a living without having to go to a boring job. But stumbling into American Made Challenges, thanks to a chance meeting with a prior contest winner, has maybe kinda lit a fire under me, and maybe now my wife's teasing is finally starting to get some validity.