I grew up in Silicon Valley, and at 15 years old got my first summer job working for a computer building company. The first week I was sweeping the floors and quickly got bored. I asked my boss for more challenging work and he put me in the assembly line building PCs. After a few weeks, I again asked for more and got moved into the custom PC building division, and was eventually moved into the repair and troubleshooting team where I diagnosed both software and hardware issues.
Fast forward about 3 years and I took a job repairing hardware and firmware of Cisco networking equipment to resell on the internet.
A few years after that, I moved to Souther California and started an internship for a nationally syndicated talk radio show. It was there that I learned how to research, edit audio clips, book high profile guests (Governors, Members of Congress, etc), run the soundboard, and was the in-house IT help. By the time I left that gig about 6 years later, I was the Associate Producer of the show.
After leaving the radio show to pursue my dream of becoming a professional musician, I had the opportunity to tour with my favorite band, serving in various roles, depending on the show/tour. I managed the merchandise sales, where I learned logistics and how to sell. I was a drum tech, and then a lighting director, running the light show during the concert. On one tour I even got to play drums for the support band for a few weeks! I learned quite a bit about people and how the world works while traveling around in a tour bus.
As soon as my touring career wound down, I jumped back into tech, starting my own web & IT consulting business in 2010, working on projects that range from New York Times Best Selling Authors and Illustrators, local and international nonprofits, running a help desk at a university, to working with Ford Motor Cars.