I hope everyone finds this site sooner or later. I figured I’d start the first of many life-updates. It's been a long time since I had the honor of hanging out with everyone, to be honest, what an incredible experience. I had no idea how special it was when we were all together, but as I've gotten older, I realize more and more how special that time was. When I started {TR} with Kane, I was probably 16 or 17 years old. Kane was the gamer, I was the web-nerd (no one would have ever guessed that). TR gave me something that I needed during that time. It was the birth of my first company, many laughs and countless life lessons. I met so many incredible people and for some, I met in person. There are so many stories to be shared, such as our in-person meetup in San Diego, our hostile takeover of another clan, me meeting a lady through TR in Hollywood.. filming TR movies and the associated craziness etc. In fact, I think I might reply to this conversation anytime I think of some that others may remember or might have forgotten, for now... I will try to stay on track.
I think TR started to die down around 2005 or so, I checked the wayback machine and it looks like I actually kept the website running until sometime in 2016, hard to believe that's accurate, I feel like it died way before that.
What's fun is, you can actually read some of the forum posts that were captured from archive.org. (https://web.archive.org/web/20170701000 ... aiders.com)
Anyway, to the important stuff. A lot has happened on my front since we all last spoke.
I got married in 2010, I have two kids, one daughter and one boy, 12 and 9 now. When I started TR I always dreamed of being a business owner, I started SubZeroPing thanks in large part to TR, you guys always covered our server expenses and we hosted tournyments etc. Fun fact, when I was 18 and was just starting SubZeroPing, I worked at JCPenny's. I found out that both of our receptionists were pregnant, so I offered to handle calls when they would have appointments or needed a break. I would use the back of un-needed receipts to write code that I would later (after 12am) go home and input into my computer. This was how a good portion of SZPanel (the server management software) was created.
Unfortunately for TR and SubZeroPing, I was hired by an Engineering firm (a small one, 75 employees) when I was 18 or 19. That ate up most of my usual tech support hours and SubZeroPing started to fade away, this was not helped by the fact that game companies realized there was a huge amount of money to be made by hosting their own servers instead of letting 3rd party hosts take on that aspect of business (WoW anyone?).
I spent all of my time at the engineering firm building internal software tools, it was an incredible place. However, I was still pursuing college and was working part time (40 hours a week). When I proposed to my girlfriend, I went to work and asked if I could go full time, to which the owner (very adamant about education said no), he cut my hours to a strict 20 hours per week. In response, I got a job at Hewlett Packard leading their Cyborg development program. It sounds fancy, but I was literally writing code to help their hardware quoting team utilize custom keyboards to speed up the quoting process.
. Fast forward, it became apparent to my first company that they needed more of me and they couldn't force me to go 'faster' with school, so they gave me a full time job and I dropped to a consulting role at HP. I ended up Marrying my wife in July of 2010, the engineering firm was in a spiral, we used to call it black Wednesdays, we went from 130+ employees down to maybe 65. Not many people know this story, but I Married my wife, flew off to our honeymoon in Maui and I received a call from an engineer, he was frantic and told me to call him back. I did, he asked where I was, I responded.. Maui and he screamed “I can’t talk to you!”. For those who know me, I am a very nervous person, but perhaps, for the first time in my life, I let it be and enjoyed my honeymoon. Upon returning home, I drove to work and no joke, I pulled into the parking lot and someone was scraping the company name off our front window, I walked into the building and the head of HR sat me down and she said, we’ve been sold and I don’t know if there is going to be a job for you. I was devastated. This began an interesting chapter in my life.
The bigger company (13,000 employees at the time) brought in a ‘talent evaluator’. For some reason, I was flagged as someone corporate should look at, was bright and had a future. Don’t worry, I am not talking myself up. I met with this talent guy and he was blown away by the software and tools I built for the previous company and scheduled a meeting with the CFO of this new huge firm. I was nervous, I did research and I prepped for this opportunity, I ended up presenting to the CFO and he was completely underwhelmed. He asked if I knew specific programming languages (C#) at the time and said I didn’t fit into any bucket they had. Told me to learn C# in six months and maybe we could meet again. I was heartbroken, the old owner of my company told me that he couldn’t protect me and that I had to re-invent myself. I don’t want this to be an insanely long post, speeding things up, I looked into joining the firms I.T. department, I almost re-located to Tennessee, but all that fell through. I then had an opportunity to write some software for a local client that interfaced with industrial controls, I decided to do that. That ended up giving me an opportunity in Arizona at a Copper Mine to write all the software to restart the mine, so I left my newly married wife for two years (I’d fly home every weekend/every other weekend) while I worked on that job. Fast forward, the company purchased another large engineering firm, we went from 14,000 people to 22,000 overnight. I was excited expecting there to be a lot of people in my field, I used our internal search tools and found out that there were 14 people with a job in my field internationally. I decided at this point it was time to look for something else. I reached out to some clients that I knew would be interested in hiring me, as well as an Engineer that I had been moonlighting for the last 4 years.
In the end, I knew that I wanted to be a business owner again and chose to go the ownership route. I joined a single engineer in August of 17 or 18, we didn’t have a way to input time, we didn’t have retirement plans, healthcare etc. Since then, I’ve helped get all that in place, we have 100% company funded healthcare, we provide 3% 401k regardless if our employees match, a timesheet system, we provide time off and continue to push forward. We now have at least 8 years of backlog and need senior people otherwise ill be bald next year. So, long story short. I own a company again, I am 41, and I have 7 employees, a healthy backlog and am looking for senior Electrical Engineers/Automation Programmers. I can't tell you how fun it is to own a company. We have three owners, I am still working to increase my percentage. Two of us are majority owners, and one is minor. SubZeroPing was set up as a partnership (a lot of liability risk for us) and my current firm is an S-Corp. I think I would have a really hard time going back and working for an employeer after this experience, I've made a ton of mistakes, but we've also gotten a lot right, the company is profitable, successful and I don't see us failing in the near future. Most impoortantly...
Let's get everyone to post their updates!
I hope you all are doing just as well.
Cheers,
Greeny