BEFORE
THE CAREER

Before the titles, stages, lightboards, keynotes, and corporate security talk, I was just a dirt-poor kid from Globe, Arizona.

Globe is one of those old mining towns where the mountains are beautiful, the people are tough, and your career options can feel pretty limited if you do not know there is a bigger world out there. It was known for mining and methamphetamines, and I had no interest in becoming professionally involved in either.

What I did have was a weird, early obsession with computers.

I did not grow up with much. We had a black-and-white TV with bunny ears, and somehow the only channel we could reliably get was WGN out of Chicago. That is how a kid from rural Arizona became a die-hard fan of the Bulls, Cubs, Bears, and Night Court. Michael Jordan was basically my first religion. Harry Caray was part of the family. And yes, in a strange full-circle twist of life, I now look a little like Bull from Night Court, just with a beard.

My childhood was a mix of desert, dirt, broken stuff, outdoor trouble, and hillbilly engineering. I loved being outside. I loved off-roading. I loved shooting guns. I loved figuring out how things worked, especially things I probably was not supposed to be messing with.

Computers were different. They felt like a portal out.

While other kids saw a beige box with a blinking cursor, I saw possibility. I saw control. I saw a machine that would do exactly what you told it to do, assuming you were stubborn enough to figure out how to talk to it.

That curiosity got me into trouble more than once.

One of my early “business ventures” could probably be described as Changes Grades for Profit. I was hacking into school systems and changing grades way before I had the maturity to understand just how stupid, risky, and illegal that was. At the time, I thought I was clever. Looking back, it was less “criminal mastermind” and more “bored poor kid with a keyboard, no supervision, and too much curiosity.”

But that was the spark.

I was not trying to become a hacker. I was trying to understand the system. Why did it work that way? What happened if you pushed on this part? What if the rules were not actually enforced by magic, but by weak passwords, lazy assumptions, and people who never thought a kid from Globe would know where to look?

That mindset shaped everything.

I learned early that technology was not just about machines. It was about access. Power. Trust. Systems. Weakness. Human behavior. And sometimes, how the kid no one expects can see the flaw everyone else missed.

I did not come from privilege. I did not have a roadmap. I did not have some polished origin story where I built a robot in a private school lab while my parents discussed Stanford applications over dinner.

I came from Globe.

I came from dirt roads, desert hills, WGN on a fuzzy TV, Chicago sports, busted knuckles, bad ideas, big dreams, and a deep belief that computers could open doors I could not even see yet.

That is where it started.

Not in a boardroom.

Not at a conference.

Not on a stage.

In a poor mining town in Arizona, with a curious kid who knew he did not want the life that was laid out in front of him, and a computer that made the world feel a little bigger.