having unsupervised access to a computer as a kid was the most important thing for my personal development
my attraction to technology started with video games. some of my earliest memories are of playing on my dad’s playstation 2 when i was 3 or 4, which led to using computers at school and at home. neither of my parents knew much about software, but they never gated my access. they just let me explore. slippery slope, but it worked out
at 7 i taught myself stop motion on my grandma’s computer using a program called pivot after watching stick-figure videos on youtube and wanting to make my own
when i was 10 i got my first laptop and immediately cracked tens of thousands of dollars worth of software. sony vegas, after effects, photoshop, illustrator, cinema 4d, maya. all of this just so i could make runescape, call of duty, and halo videos for fun
from 10 to 15 i spent thousands of hours watching tutorials, editing, and experimenting. for a middle-school project i recorded a short movie in halo’s “forge” mode that accidentally used real directing and editing principles. i didn’t know the terms, i just knew what “good” felt like from obsession and self-study. it never felt like learning, i just wanted to make cool stuff because i loved games and computers (and i’m a huge nerd)
as a teenager my interests shifted to streetwear, sneakers, and making money. that pulled me into forums like niketalk and kanytothe, and eventually sneaker botting at 17. i flipped anything with a margin: shoes, clothes, concert tickets, kylie jenner makeup, whatever. that meant building connections, researching, and spotting patterns like when certain stores would quietly release inventory. i joined one of the first groups that treated these opportunities like a full-time research job
the botting scene was brutal. software licenses went for $300 to $20k on the secondary market and still didn’t guarantee success. proxies, servers, scraped links and secret skus, tiny exploits, all of it affected your odds while you competed with tens or hundreds of thousands of other people using similar tools
over time i noticed a unique arbitrage opportunity. companies were competing with each other just as hard as consumers were. one tool could dominate one week and be irrelevant the next. design and marketing were a real edge. they created loyalty, brand equity, and perceived quality. better-designed software held higher resale value (assuming it actually worked). design had an immediate impact on revenue in a way i hadn’t seen in “normal” software. whenever a company shipped a better interface or refreshed branding alongside performance improvements, the secondary market spiked in anticipation
even though i recognized this opportunity, i wasn’t sure how i could get started. then my friend owen, who i met through sneakers and botting, pushed me to make a twitter account in 2018 and use that as my way in
i had no idea how to get my first client. nobody knew who i was, or what i did. but they did know the companies behind the botting software. some of the first posts i made were loading animations using those company logos, nothing crazy by any means. people ended up loving them, and my posts started getting some traction. not too long after, companies and individuals were reaching out for loading animations, marketing videos, graphics, and interface work
two years later i was charging $5-10k for marketing animations and $15k+ for design projects, taking on new work every week while juggling 8am classes and exams in college. i figured it out as i went and was able to work with the leaders of the space
now i’m in san francisco working on software and still basically doing what i did as a kid. i even met the ceo of the current company i’m at through connections from the sneaker community years ago. today that looks like designing and building products and flows, but it still feels like throwing together video-game edits
all because i had early access to a computer and the freedom to explore it without knowing where it would lead