I want to help you learn everything you need to know about using your engineering skills to stop building systems for some MBA or product manager type, and start building systems for yourself to organically grow a small business without needing any VC funding.

Hint: Marketing and advertising done right MAKES money, not loses it… Meaning a dollar in equals more than dollar out… got it?

I didn’t.

I didn’t at all, and I want to share they story with you of how I discovered this, and how Cloud Native Entrepreneur came to be.

Let’s go back to when I was a “UX Developer” in my second year out of college, building FullStack web applications with .Net and JavaScript…

The year was 2012 - I was about a year and a half into my first software engineering job and I was feeling pretty good about myself.

Having this job finally allowed me to move out of home for one. My dad likes to tell the story of how I told him:

“What are you doing up so early?” asked my Dad.
“I have an appointment… I’m getting a tattoo”. I replied.
“Oh no you’re not, not while you’re living under my roof!”.
“Yea, we need to talk about that too… I got a new job, found an apartment, and I’m moving out tomorrow!”

And so I got that tattoo, and moved out. Freedom has always been a big driving factor for me. I guess you could say I’m a bit inclined to “go against the grain” as well.

I always knew I didn’t want to work for some big company. I was pretty obsessed with the idea of entrepreneurship and already had several projects with dreams of bigger things in college, such as “GeoCreatures” and “InstantCircle”.

Being an entrepreneur seemed so cool. I was a software engineer, and it seemed to me that engineering was a key factor in building a tech company so I sought to be one of the best.

The idea of the freedom - the pure absolute freedom - that one could obtain by making it big in software was enthralling…

My parents weren’t great off after a drawn out divorce which cost them mostly everything. With tech money like that, I could buy them both a house.

I wanted a startup of my own, so it made sense that I found a startup to work at once graduating. I wanted to learn how it’s done… At this startup job I found, the product I was working on was a multi-channel marketing platform named “Conversen”, and I was the 8th employee. I didn’t know it then, I was just in it for the programming, but years later it’d turn out that I very much enjoyed the marketing part of things.

Over almost two years there I’d become respected at the startup, and even got my buddy a job working there, too. We had internal soccer teams and frequent team lunches that were a lot of fun. It was an exciting time, as the company the year before made it on to Inc. 500’s list of fast growing private companies, and internally, we’d just heard word that we were being acquired by a multi-billion dollar company - Experian.

Many people know Experian as the Credit Monitoring company, but at the time, in 2012, they already had a multi-billion dollar marketing division - and they were looking to expand. With the acquisition, I’d now gone from 1 of 8 employees to 1 of 20-something as the company grew, and would now be 1 of 15,000 employees. I wasn’t thrilled with the idea given my penchant for startups, so I was already having some thoughts of moving on when a recruiter called and told me they’d pay me double what I was making to move to NYC to work for a billionaire in an internal “innovation” division building new products for his company.

There was just one problem, though, I had to pass the interview first… You see, the problem with that, is I’m pretty bad at interviewing. Interviews make me nervous and I still literally fail all of them to this day....

Which is why now I just get people to come to me - like you, hi, hello there - Breaking that fourth wall in text… :)

I'm out of characters here.

To read the rest of the story head on over to https://www.cloudnativeentrepreneur.com/about