I am a traumatic brain injury survivor that has fully recovered. How I did that was by playing Lumosity everyday, signing up for marathons so I would force myself to train and exercise, starting a blog and trying to launch a startup.
What you may or may not know about brain injuries is that right after the injury there’s a small window, a sweet spot if you will where you can dramatically boost your recovery rate. All you have to do is push yourself by doing things that make you uncomfortable, learning new things, and connecting with people. That is it!
Of course, all of which require you to be thick skinned. The point I’m trying to make is that because of my brain injury, mental health is the one thing I struggled with the most. I get these highs and lows. When I was in a low, I found myself escaping and not doing the things I was supposed to be doing. This sometimes affected my ability to hold on to a job. That is why in January 2021 an opportunity came up for me to be my own boss and I took it!
I was accepted into a startup incubator with an idea for building 1-click infrastructure provisioning web app. It was a 3-month program. By March 2021, that idea turned into “Mental Health Stack,” a resource for finding self-help tools & apps for managing mental health. During the ideation phase that is how things sometimes are. You are constantly pivoting and embracing new ideas. As an entrepreneur, you’re encouraged to move fast and not be fixated on any one idea.
During the program, I met a few blockchain enthusiasts who turned me onto Ethereum. It is a decentralized, open-source blockchain technology. It was founded by Vitalik Buterin, a boy genius, Russian-born Canadian programmer. I would recommend reading his blog except sometimes I’m scared to.
There are many different explanations to the question “What is Ethereum” that you can find on the web from technical to non-technical. I describe it in 2 ways.
It is a world computer. It uses the fundamental principles of Math and Cryptography to solve a fundamental problem, how do you get strangers to trust one another.
It is an underlying blockchain technology that provides the ability to build decentralised applications (aka dapps) on top of it.
From that initial conversation about buying crypto led me down the rabbit hole to doing cryptozombies, reading the Ethereum whitepaper, and joining my first blockchain hackathon, 2021 Virtual Chainlink Hackathon.
This was what we built.
My background is CS. The more I learned, the more it occurred to me that this was going to be the future. I knew I wanted to start a blockchain company. As this was all new to me, I didn’t know what problem I was going to solve. This article by Chainlink has a good summary of the different use cases for smart contracts. What are smart contracts you may ask? In layman terms, a smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. Source.
But this was all new to me and there were different use cases for it. I knew blockchain and the entire ecosystem built around Ethereum was where I wanted to be. And it is a robust ecosystem from the vast array of tools and dapps available.
I’m not sure how many dapps there were in 2021 but as of this writing there are 2,970 (according to stateofthedapps).
My plan to learn faster, validate ideas, and find out where I fit in would be best done by becoming a full time hackathoner. That was what I did for the rest of 2021.
To be continued…
I wasn’t going to even post this but after some inspiration from Grant. Thanks! And some inspiration from crushing the fear of posting). I’m posting this 344 words short. I figure, it’s better to be imperfect and publish than perfect and not.