The Founder's Journal: Origins

"On fumes of hope, we strike against the barricade

To fates unknown- a love undared but shared by most...

Becoming the host of where we go

Onto hidden shores that become their home.

Then onto the next, until there’s no more—

Back to expanse and infinity,

And then becoming old again.”

-The Founder’s Call

As a founder, have you ever felt a willpower so strong and on fire, that the world couldn’t stop you?

I am reminded of a moment some years ago within the historic arc of humanity.

It was January of 2020 at Tech Alpharetta, and I had just cracked this new event structure. The community directors of Tech Alpharetta and ATDC were both there debating over who would host me after I went from 20 people to 66 over the course of a single month.

They decided to compromise and I agreed to an alternating venue schedule.

The early days, when we were just a series of local grassroots groups

That February, I had 30 people show up to Georgia Tech’s ATDC—with the worst of a snowstorm leading up to the event. Meaning they intentionally drove through a snowstorm to get there.

This was a big deal, especially since I was still using this new community to populate my own startup team, and not treating it as its own thing.

However, news of the pandemic was starting to spread, and the next event would be at Tech Alpharetta with the alternating venue agreement. I thought I could convince them that we could come up with some liability-mitigating adaptation.

A 99.9% survivability virus would not derail my outsized ambition. There was no off-switch for my perceived trajectory.

Heading back to Tech Alpharetta when it was usually open, I saw there were no cars in the lot. As I got closer, I saw it was completely empty inside.

I held out hope—irrationally—that perhaps I was missing something, and walked up to the door. Locked. The inevitability of this moment had set in.

I called the community manager with the plan of overwhelming her with the excitement of upside and assurances on risks, but it came down to the entire world shutting down and my being the same organizational size as a single-cell organism.

But I would not be stopped. I refused the cue the rest of the world followed, with an edge of anger.

What would happen with forward virtually was unknown, but I knew more and more people were consistently using Zoom. I adapted the new event structure to Zoom and held some of the first virtual events on Meetup. And I know that because they had no virtual link field- it was in the physical address field that I was putting in the Zoom link.

For two years, I ran the virtual meetings every month, and found that people were looking for virtual events in groups set in different cities than them. And in different countries. And on different continents.

This crazy surprise expanded my sights much farther, but also grew locally with fellow Georgians not stopping either.

Then all of a sudden, in early 2022, the grip of the Pandemic let up. People started to come out again, little by little. And as it turned out, when Tech Alpharetta and other venues opened up their doors again, I already had an emergent community and an inertia that hadn’t died.

I kept going while every single institution went into a coma. I felt like in the movie Forrest Gump when he and Lt. Dan still rode out in a hurricane to continue shrimping, and every other ship that was moored to a harbor was destroyed— they ended up taking all the business.

Every overpaid community manager for some corporate brand was getting a handful of attendees to their events, but I was getting 20–25 immediately out of the shutdown.

And because in group dynamics, if there are many starting as 1 but I’m starting as 20, the people looking to join something will join the group of 20.

I met Robb on the first event after the shutdown, and he convinced me to treat this community as its own thing and not as a recruitment tool for a single startup. He was running his own community & meetup - Entrepreneurs Anonymous. From there, we united all the groups under the Startup Oasis banner.

Our future is not yet written, but today we exist at a certain level of prominence because when the entire world said stop, I reacted like a founder: I didn’t just say “No”.

I said “Go f*&$% yourself.”

And as a founder, you will need to learn the balance between being open to input and adaptation, and refusing to yield when everything you believe in is on the line.

If you bend too easily, the fire that makes your venture distinct will be smothered.

If you never bend, you’ll break yourself against the weight of reality.

The art is in knowing which moments demand humility and which demand defiance—and having the courage to act accordingly.