Startup Hobo

Work Progress – Loose Ends

Hey all! My work team was in town last week so pardon the radio silence. Who knew commuting was so time-consuming (being totally sarcastic)?

I only have a small update this week: I spent some time implementing that sanity check function for my AWS infrastructure last night. The function takes a user ID and queries Firebase for a UUID I create when a user initially calls the deployment workflow.

I stopped myself there for the time being as adding any other functionality would require a little more planning.

This week my goal is to set up Stripe, set up, assemble a pricing / subscription page, and set up a deployment workflow.

Have a great week!

• Jonathan

Work Progress – Payment Paradox (Part 2)

With those five options in front of us – it’s time to choose a path.

For this phase of the application, I’ve chosen to pursue Option 2 – Free Trial. This model serves a few purposes:

• Exposes users to a full set of features immediately
• Extremely easy to implement with payment infrastructure- remitting payment can be automatically activated and collected with a service like Stripe after the free trial period has elapsed
• Extremely easy to implement with the application architecture – there won’t be any logic to gate features based on a customer’s payment state

Let’s break down the benefits point by point below.

Exposure to Full Features

I’d rather have users experience the full set of features and then revisit pricing and payment in the future, once more users and features are active.

The feature set as of today is quite small, so there’s no need right now to really gate or price on features right now.

This is also a good test of the overall applications hypothesis, “Is there enough value (or even premise of value) worth paying for?”. If features are lacking in any aspect, it’s easier to adjust course when there isn’t a lot of deployed complexity.

Integration with Payment Infrastructure

Going along with my theme of keeping things simple and lightweight, I don’t want to spend the time nor energy figuring out payment infrastructure, and the details with a freemium or tiered user experience.

Having a straightforward free trial period provides an experience to users with the expectation, that payment needs to be made for continued use of the service.

I plan on doing a little more research, but Stripe seems to be the easiest payment provider to integrate with. Once payment information is collected, it’s fairly straightforward to enable and disable a users account based on payment state and free trial duration.

I should mention, from what I’ve already researched, Stripe also handles payment processing with their own UI widget – which thus saves me a lot of time from the start.

Integration with Application Infrastructure

Very similar to the point above, with users having immediate access to all the features, there’s little work to be done to integrate a trial period with their experience. While there’s a fair amount of non-trivial work involved with gating features behind a flag or similar solution, it’s not critical to this particular phase of the application.

At this point, one goal providing users an opportunity to experience the application at its foundation and continue building features that users want to use (with their feedback).

A small tangent – earlier in my journey building this application, I was always worried about scale, “doing it right”, or making it perfect. I realized a lot later, it’s more important to ship some code, get users to give me input, and move as fast as possible.

I can worry about scale, “doing it right”, and other things of that nature when the application has stabilized and I actually have a paying and committed user base. Down the road, I do imagine that I’ll have to revisit the payment and feature model. It’s merely not important right now.

Next Steps

With all that said, I’ve got a big list of to-do’s:

• Investigate and deploy Stripe to the application
• Figure out pricing
• Finish bug-bashing
• Assemble a social media marketing campaign
• Reactivate my former beta users

That’s it for this now, have a great week!

• Jonathan

Work Progress

Technical Work

I’ve spent the last few days cleaning up some of the authentication flows and bug squashing on both the client and server.

On the client, I had a bug that would result in Firebase overwriting the entire user preferences data blob, during a page update.

The way the client is built, I provide an authentication context on the root DOM node but the element wasn’t set up to subscribe to changes in the preferences context. I’ve got a fix staged but I’ll need a few hours to test things out.

The server is in good shape, meaning I probably won’t be tinkering too much with the code, aside from putting in some safeguards to prevent a user from repeatedly deploying infrastructure through my service. Those safeguards are really there so I don’t end up with some monstrous AWS bill every month.

The next big item will be beginning working on getting both client and server deployed to AWS. My original prototype utilized Elastic Beanstalk and S3 to achieve this, so I’m hoping I can re-use some of that knowledge.

On the non-technical side, I’ve been planning out my pricing model for the application.

Pricing Strategy

Pricing is probably one of the most complex topics to work through for this application. There are a handful of similar products already on the marketplace, however pricing based off competition is not a sound approach.

Before outlining payment models, it’s good to outline the requirements and reasoning behind collecting payment.

I want my users to be invested in the product and have a sense of ownership of their information and experience. By remitting payment, they should feel empowered to voice their opinion of the product and their user experience.

In today’s world, we’re extremely accustomed to “free” software – Google, Facebook, and YouTube etc… These companies have economies of scale to sell advertisements (and customers’ information) as additional revenue streams. This model, as we’ve all found, limits our ability to advocate for change in an effective manner. We have a choice to go to other platforms but it’s inherently difficult. Those platforms don’t have the revenue, economies of scale, or features to be true competitors to these “free” products.

I want my customers to know they have a choice and they should freely vote with their voices and dollars.

The other facet of payment (versus totally free or even open source) is that it takes time, energy, and money to build and maintain an application. Ideally this project will provide enough revenue to be self-sustaining, with lots of happy customers.

My mini-goal for payment can be summed up by this statement: Can I get one user, to pay me that first dollar (or first month’s fee)?

Collecting payment is not only a business concern – it’s also a technical concern. Being a sole developer, I have to balance the needs of getting payment and the complexity of building a service that interfaces with my payment / billing model.

With that context out of the way, let’s go over the payment models:

Option 1: Freemium

Similar to Spotify’s subscription model, in which users can use a free set of features for an indefinite amount of time. While I won’t be serving interstitial advertisements on the site, users will be able to subscribe to payment to obtain additional features.

Option 2: Free Trial

With this option, users would receive free access to the entire application and all its features, for an initial period of time. Once that period of time has elapsed, users would be responsible for an on-going subscription fee.

Option 3: No Free Trial – Instant Subscription

In this option, users would be obligated to pay immediately upon sign up. Upon sign up (and on-going payment) users receive full access to the application.

Option 4: Piecemeal / Hybrid

In this more complex model, users would be able to piece together the services they desire, à la carte. Based on the services or features desired, payment would be calculated additively, with some nominal base fee being collected each month.

Option 5: Combination of Option 1 and Option 2

In this model, users would get a free trial, with access to a full feature set. After a certain amount of time has elapsed, the users would be responsible for remitting payment to receive advanced features, or remain at a free tier with a smaller feature set.

Payment Paradox

I’m going to let these options simmer for a bit – I’ll follow up with another post detailing which option I chose, the “why”, and then the “how.

Thanks for following along!

• Jonathan

Work Progress

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been moving into a new house the last two weeks, so startup work had fallen to the wayside while I get myself (and the cat) situated.

With that said, I wrapped up the client to server API routing and JWT token verification on the server. Firebase has made this ridiculously easy to implement.

Right now, my client page has four main API calls it makes to the server, all of which need to be authenticated (and protected). On the client, I have this implemented within my API service layer. A token gets generated for whichever user is logged in and passed as an Authentication: Bearer header in the request to the server.

Once on the server, I have middleware that verifies and decodes the JWT token from the request header. From there, I have the user’s identity on the server for other API related tasks.

Next steps:

• Clean up some of the above logic – I rushed through it to get a working model and there’s some optimizations that will lead to better maintainability.
• Finish up the UX work from the last update, I have something rudimentary working but it’s rough and doesn’t provide value to the user in its current form.
• Set up a payment service.

Have a great week!

• Jonathan

Work Progress

Last week went by in a blur – I spent several days sanity checking the systmed tooling I had worked on prior. I forgot that I needed to integrate this with another service I had been writing. Now that the services are complete, integrated, and tested, I can focus on doing some UI development this week.

The UI feature isn’t “critical” but its main purpose is to ensure my customers can see or understand that work on the server is being performed when they interact with the UI feature that launches the aforementioned EC2 workflow.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be working on a plan to reactivate those early beta users, working on a deployment model for the application, and also figuring out a payment system (Stripe, etc…).

Once this scope of work is done – I’ll be assembling a launch checklist and making the actual product live. The work doesn’t stop there though.

In parallel, I’ll have to work on marketing and selling the product, while determining which set of features to tackle next (the list I have written down is quite large)…

Writing it Down

This past week, I had a wonderful conversation with my manager surrounding quarterly goals and I was reminded the impact of simply writing things down (big and small, simple tasks or complex).

Someone once told me, “Writing things down gives you the privilege of forgetting.” This reigns true for lots things like notes, to-do’s, grocery lists, or ideas that need to be revisited. But I’ve found that writing something down is often (for me) the first piece of tangible action of executing that goal or task.

We all know that writing down your grocery list is simple and easy to do, and mitigates the risk of us forgetting that awesome snack or beverage while shopping. I’m guilty of thinking I should write a list down and inevitably going shopping without one. I end up forgetting all sorts of groceries (essential and non-essential). It’s almost inconsequential if I forgot that ingredient or bag of potato chips.

In life however, writing down those big goals carries a bit more weight. I’m referring to the ones like “Save money for a new car.” or “Move to SOME-CITY to pursue a new opportunity.” As I said above, writing things down is often the first piece of action you can take towards that goal.

Once committed to paper, my brain starts working its way backward, solving for how to accomplish the task. Writing lets me sort and organize my ideas, visualize the information that’s been rolling around in my head all day, and gives me an idea of scope.

I start creating milestones, going over key facets worth exploring, gaps in knowledge/experience, and perhaps adding in timelines so those goals don’t collide with other parts of life (thank you Google calendar!). A plan of execution usually materializes and “suddenly” I have a path forward.

With that process quasi-completed, it’s a matter of execution (and sometimes adjusting) those plans.

I’ve found, often in my life, that writing down a seemingly large goal, tremendously helps with getting there. I’ve ran dozens of half marathons because my best friend and I sat down one evening to plan an entire year’s worth of running events (and then some). I’ve built big and small projects at work and at home, I’ve even become healthier by writing down fitness goals.

This is probably one of the main reasons why I’ve begun writing about building my startup – I’m letting the process take hold and following through. I’m excited about the work and I really can’t wait for all the good things to come.

Have a nice week!

• Jonathan

Work Progress

I’ve just about wrapped up work on the EC2 launch infrastructure. Systemd and the tooling I put together seem to be working well after running a few tests this past weekend!

This is a pretty big piece of work to be “done” so I’m excited. My next work items are to work out a few UX issues and a small feature that ties into the EC2 launching infrastructure. Once that’s done, I’ll need to tackle the user token / auth flow for making API calls to the service’s backend.

I’ll be slipping my goal of shipping by the end of this month but I’m okay with that. Progress has been steady and I’ve picked up a lot of momentum with the infrastructure I’ve completed.

What

As mentioned in the prior post, I wanted to touch on what my actual product is. If you haven’t had a chance yet, head over to Serendipity Bio.

I’ve been building a data aggregation platform for diabetics to help improve their lifestyles.

If you’re a type-1 (or type-2) diabetic, you may have multiple devices to deliver insulin or monitor your blood glucose (in real time). However, reporting and data-gathering has been fragmented, due to the number of manufacturers, devices, and global healthcare data standards.

Taking a step back from these particular devices, the number of wearables, sensors, and gadgets available to track your health (and other bodily functions) has grown significantly in the last several years. Unfortunately for the user, a lot of this data is hard to consume if you have different brands or devices. Serendipity aims to change that, and make the users’ data easy to load, consume, and take action with.

My goal is straightforward: improve people’s lives with software.

Why Pt. 2

I chose this particular idea out of inspiration from a culmination of my 10+ years of work experience. My hypothesis is, I don’t need to attempt building a service application that delivers burrito’s to your doorstep in less than 10 minutes, nor do I need to build software that tries to sell advertisements nor sell your data to advertisers.

Having a specific problem to solve in software (with a tangible path forward) allows focus from distractions and eliminates other noise when building building a business.

There’s a saying that I’ve heard while working at Netflix, “Avoid building solutions for problems that don’t exist” or “….that’s a solution looking for a problem.” If you look around today, we have so many applications and services struggling to find problems that don’t exist.

My greater goal for Serendipity, attempt to change the way we manage our health and our healthcare data. If anything, the last 3 years of COVID and pandemic living have really exposed how terrible we are at dealing with digital healthcare data, privacy, and anything related.

Let’s change that.

Work Progress

Lately, I’ve been working on assembling a critical piece of EC2 infrastructure that launches an EC2 instance upon request, with a few other tasks like setting up routing, tagging the instance, etc…

However, I got a bit tramlined finding a proper way of starting the Node process.

At first, I was attempting to use a user-agent string (passed to the instance at launch) but Node isn’t available on the path of the user that runs the script’s contents. I believe the scripts run as the root user which isn’t necessarily a good thing…

After some fumbling / Googling, I found that systemd is probably the right way to start the Node process I need, after machine boot.

I’ve got a few evenings of work to button up the application daemon and I should be able to finalize and ship this piece.

Why

Switching gears a bit, I’d like to elaborate on why I’m starting my own company. There’s really two broad facets to why I’ve been longing to start my own company.

The first facet being personal and the second facet being professional, with both sharing a bit of crossover.

On the personal front, I’m just impatient sometimes. As time has gone on, I’ve practiced being more patient, listening with intent, and hearing people out, fighting my impulse to jump in and take action.

As selfish and narcissistic as this sounds, I have this conviction that I need to be the change I want to see in the world. I grew up around my Dad running his own business while juggling three of us kids. Only now, do I realize how many challenges he and my Mother faced, immigrating to the United States nearly 40 years ago.

I’ve come to see that I thrive when I encounter challenges, taking charge, and I find it extremely rewarding and joyful, getting to lead and inspire others.

Now, transitioning to the professional piece…

When I look around technology today, and specifically in tech entrepreneurship, rarely do I see the Asian minority being represented in a leadership capacity. I know Asian leaders exist but there’s rarely any news, mention, or spotlighting of APAC entrepreneurs (or even engineers). This is probably deliberate on their part, let’s respect that fact that successful people often do it quietly. But still, the point remains, representation matters.

I’m tired of the idea or catch phrase, “Come work for us, we need you to solve XYZ” or “FOLLOW our leader to THEIR vision.” I’m tired of solving problems that don’t have sustainable solutions, and I’m tired hearing about “charismatic”, entitled leaders whom are merely assholes (with a lot money) that take advantage of the underprivileged.

I want to be a leader in a space where there’s plenty of room for everyone to succeed, and define their own vision and mission.

Expect a follow up post this week about the business idea and what the product actually is.

• Jonathan

Welcome!

Happy New Year!

As promised, here’s the first chapter of my own startup “story”. In this post, I’ll cover the following:

• Goals and intent of this blog / newsletter
• Goals I’ve defined for my startup
• Historical context of my startup

Goals for this blog

The main intent of this blog is to create a way for me to share, discuss, and hold myself accountable, building my own company.

Even though I’ve worked in technology for nearly 10+ years, I’ve found that by only by being deliberate, can I grow myself and my skillset by sharing and connecting with others while doing the building.

Topics that I plan on discussing include (not exhaustive):

• Creating a MVP
• Building infrastructure
• Customer acquisition
• Venture capital and taking outside investment
• Being a solo, technical founder
• Why I want to build something for myself and my customers
• Balancing short-term and long-term objectives

In short, this blog isn’t intended to be a guidebook on how to start a company, run a business, or even approach engineering.

I don’t really plan on talking about “hustle”, “productivity hacking”, or any other cliché startup euphemisms. This is an even-paced effort as I work towards obtaining paying customers for something I’ve built.

I’ll use this blog to sound out ideas, layout options/decisions, issues I’m faced with, and attempt to keep track of my progress. I’ve always found that writing (for me) has always driven action, so, here we go!

Immediate goals for the startup

My goal for the next month(-ish) includes launching the MVP I’ve been building over the last 1.5 years.

That sentence though, over-simplifies what launching really means:

• Providing an authentication flow from client to back-end server
• Various housekeeping chores involved with my AWS infrastructure
• Last bits of feature development that are critical to the MVP
• Deploying client and server code to a production environment
• Testing the user sign up and application flow

Historical Context

In the following paragraphs, I’ll condense down how we got to the present day.

This project has been on a slow-burn, for the last several years of my career. The idea incubated when I realized I could combine my biotech experience with my time at working in advertising analytics. Landing at Netflix in 2015 threw gasoline onto the whole process, but more on this later.

Beginning in 2018, I conducted customer surveys (contacted via a private Facebook group), and selected a few key users, whom were willing to share their pain points with existing products in the marketplace. With data in hand, I began designing a rough sketch of my application.

At the time, I didn’t realize there were products out there that would enable me to bootstrap the coding/design process, so I begrudgingly built the entire site by hand with Material UI, Bootstrap, and React.js. This took me months!

While building the client UI, I also spent my time building a back-end server to perform some data transformation, again building this from scratch, and even implementing user authentication using Passport.js.

The application worked well enough, even though it looked like someone coded it back in the 90’s, before modern browsers became available. The back-end code was also functional even though it lacked any good coding patterns. I did write a handful of unit tests though!

With that version of the code done, jump to the spring of 2019. I had launched a beta version to the aforementioned private Facebook group, using AWS.

The bleary morning before “launching” the beta, I shipped the code to also do some session tracking via Google Analytics, and ran my deployment script. I spent nearly all day refreshing the GA dashboard to see if people were signing up.

To my excitement, after the first week or so, I had gathered around 300 users whom had created user accounts (with active sessions). This was a fantastic early signal that I had a viable product. Shortly after (a matter of weeks), life got in the way, a family member became ill, and suddenly, I was going through a divorce.

Life is messy, isn’t it?

Following the winter of 2019, as we all know, COVID arrived. During the last two years, I’ve focused on rebuilding the MVP with an eye for design and infrastructure I don’t have to build nor maintain. I’ve also implemented a few key pieces of technology that will be my competitive edge.

If the beta I shipped was able to garner attention, my true MVP will actually be somewhat polished and utilize maintainable engineering patterns. The beta would not be able to support growth nor enable me to ship features easily to the customer, hence the need for the soft rewrite of the project.

Tools and technologies I’m using include:

• Creative Tim as a very fast way to bootstrap my client code (using React.js)

• Firebase to do all things authentication, user management, and data storage
• Mailchimp to manage user communications
• Google Analytics to provide a little more granularity alongside Mailchimp telemetry
• AWS technologies, including EC2, Route53, S3, and ElasticBeanstalk to handle all my deployed infrastructure

Closing

Pardon the rushed tone of this post, getting rid of my brain fog as we enter the new year has been a bit of a challenge (and I have a few other personal projects I’ve been working on) – I’d rather post something early and follow up versus taking too much time to post something.

In my next post, I’ll elaborate on some of my decisions and provide some updates on tackling that to-do list I enumerated earlier.

If any of you were wondering, the title of this post, “Two more miles…” is a bit of an inside joke for endurance athletes.

“Just a little bit more..” or “The finish is around the corner!” is often cheered by fans on the sidelines, and all you, the athlete can conjure up is, “Where the f*ck is that finish line?” followed by incessantly checking the distance on your Garmin watch or musing the pain emanating from all your joints and muscles.

During any type of endurance race, the last few miles always seem the longest and it seems the feeling holds true for where I am with launching the startup.

Have a nice week!

 

What’s in a name or a number?

Let that question sit with you for a bit.

Mull it over like a sip of wine, an ice cold beer, or your favorite non-alcoholic beverage of choice.

We’ve been conditioned in society, to associate value with a brand name, the cost of an item, or even the brand icon. We purchase certain things with the perception a particular brand will inherently bring quality, features, longevity, or even political stance.  Often, we associate some intrinsic value of an item with the amount paid.  The more expensive goods often providing a sense of allure, luxury, flavor profile, or even practicality.

This same thinking, tactics, and strategies have crept into technical recruiting.  Various recruiting reach-outs to me (and others), have included the names of various prestigious universities, celebrity founders and CEO’s, and of course, the amount of venture capital the firm has acquired.

Here are two excellent articles on the halo effect I’m referring to:

• Harvard Business Review
• McKinsey & Company

Acknowledging the privilege I’ve had to work in software for a little more than a decade (that really hurts to type out), I firmly believe we’ve been doing a disservice to each other and to our industry with these approaches.

There’s multiple facets to how these strategies incorrectly prioritize aspects of hiring:

• Candidates only care about money.
• Candidates only care about the founders’ resume and what other prestigious companies they have passed through.
• Similarity bias, we broadly enforce the founder (or company) archetype can only come from certain educational backgrounds or prior work experience.

I empathize that recruiting is a numbers game (as many of my manager colleagues have shared with me).  The more people in the funnel, the more potential for interviews, and higher conversion rates into offer letters.  There’s a perception that celebrity CEOs, prestigious schools, or funding series will attract talent.  But I question, what type of talent are you trying to recruit?  Are you trying to put bodies behind desks or build something that will be successful and sustainable?

As an industry, we should be doing better than this.  Here’s a story to help define the way I’ve been thinking about this topic.

Recently, I went through an interview process with a start-up in an early series of funding based off a recruiting email. The email directly stated the founders’ educational background, all from Stanford and their funding series, Series A or B (if memory serves).  I took the call because their product interested me and I wanted to know more about the company.

I prepared for the interview, and assembled a list of questions surrounding the following areas:

• What is the product roadmap, marketing, and sales roadmap?
• How many engineers have they hired for this particular business unit?  What are their backgrounds?
• Will I get face time with the founders?  How will I get to influence product direction?
• What is the culture?
• What types of partnerships and freedom will I have to execute my role?
• What does compensation look like?

I’m sad to say, I only received partial answers from the recruiter, and was met with a lot of, “I don’t know – I don’t think we can share that.”  This isn’t to blame the recruiter at all.  He relented to me that he had only started technical recruiting months ago and wasn’t privy to the vocabulary or inner-workings of the company he was staffing for.  From my point of view, he was set up for failure.

The point of this story:  the founders’ educational background, their funding series, did not mean a single thing to me.   I was determining how viable their product is, getting a feel for their work culture, and collecting data on how I can be empowered to have the impact they desire.  The final piece being compensation, would I be paid to have the impact they are seeking?

The industry has been signaling for a long time that candidates only care about are degrees, job titles, and money.  If we’re trying to sell the idea of helping each other solve hard problems, focus on those problems and topics first.

Money and compensation are always important but it’s important how much I’ll receive versus what freebies I’m getting in the office.

Putting another fine point on things, let’s assume a company has $10M in funding and the company currently employees 20 people.  If each employee is paid a $150k yearly salary, $3M of that funding is already spoken for.  The remaining $7M is allocated to overhead (rent, equipment, licenses, etc…), healthcare, maybe snacks, and those spiffy laptops they’re providing.

These astounding numbers send the wrong message.  Simply because a company has secured a somewhat large funding round (no easy feat in itself), does not translate into me having any more money in my pocket, or being given the resources to be successful in my role.

If you’re a young start up, be clear to your candidates, “There’s not a lot of money on the table, but you’ll learn a lot.”  If you’re trying to sell me an idea, everyone in the company should be clear on what it is you’re selling and how you hope to sell it.  If there’s lack of transparency and information from the get-go, it will be extremely hard for me (or anyone else) to be successful and aligned with the company’s mission.

Illustrate that the company, founders, and engineers have a sound development roadmap, have a sustainable monetization model, and are empathetic to the needs of its employees and its customers.  This last point holds true to both young start ups and mature companies.  This signals to me the company cares about affecting positive change and not seeking some quick exit or land grab.  Those latter things are okay too but be up front about it.

The industry is striving to change recruiting, looking for more diversity, and attempting to be more inclusive.

This starts with being more upfront and honest about what we’re all building, how we’re building solutions, and whom we’re selling these solutions to.  We have to more cognizant and deliberate about how we hire and whom we hire.

Stop signaling over brand names, celebrity leadership, and funding rounds.  Send signal on all the other things that are actually important, the things that make us all the more successful.

So.  What’s in a name or number?

I grew up being bullied, picked on because I’m Asian.  I was picked on for being fat and unathletic.

I went to a private high school where bullying shouldn’t have happened.  People said I had anger issues. People in school thought that I would go “postal” because I was angry.  This was right after Columbine.

Wouldn’t you be angry getting picked on for 4 years in a row?  No one ever asked why I was angry or upset.  No one offered me help.

I had told the counselors multiple times, their answer?  Go to a different school.

Talk isn’t enough.

The school I went to was Los Angeles Baptist.  The counselors were Mr. Robert Chevalier and Ms. Natwick.

Chevalier told me to transfer schools.  Natwick said I would never get into USC.  No one provided options.  I had to find out about them myself.

People like them are complicit in the racist America that immigrants, people of color and their children experience.  Don’t hide behind religion or political ideology.

I would wake up crying, dreading going to school every day.

I made it my mission to get into USC and succeed.

I made it my mission to show that I wouldn’t be bullied.

I made it my mission to show all those people, that their hate, racism, and narcissism wouldn’t hold me back.

 

 

Fast forward, my diploma hangs proudly above my desk, with combined degrees in computer science and business.  This isn’t bragging,  the diploma represents the promise and testament I made to myself, to be successful in lieu of all the hate, racism, and anger I had to deal with.

I bring all this to you because you should know the type of hate and racism isn’t only pervasive in some distant city, state, or country.

I bring this to you, to make it personal.

Are you all going to help me and others make this better, for current and future generations?

Are we going to keep talking about race while crazy people run around (like the terrorist in Atlanta) and we get more people like Chevalier and Natwick telling our future generations to deal and normalize racism, bias, hate, and mediocrity?  Put your child in my shoes.  What do you want for them?

If you want to help, here’s how.

You either have money, time or expertise.  Use them.

Donate money to causes, spend time and mentor your expertise.  Spend money on educating the underserved.  Help minority kids succeed and go to college.  Donate to schools that need the money for supplies, tuition, and meals.

Spend your time and mentor the underserved.  Help students young and old succeed.  Remember the SAT?  My family didn’t learn about the tests (nor the study groups) until two months before I had to sign up.

Spend your money on minority owned businesses.  Educate yourself on where that donated dollar goes.  Donate and spend with deliberate intent.

Become invested in seeing someone succeed.  Don’t spend money because you want to alleviate yourself about feeling guilty.

Invest yourself in each other.  I’m tired of reading books about race, talking about race, or virtue signaling about race.  I’m tired of inaction.

Take action.  Invest.

And let’s be clear, the intent is not to make anyone feel guilty.  I don’t care how much or how little privilege you had growing up.  We’re beyond what feels right, wrong, good, bad, or ugly.

Move past feelings.

Take action.

Invest in each other.