My companies run on a team of AI agents I built. Every message they send is logged, and a weekly self-test publishes its own failures — including the week it broke.
the week it broke →THE STORY
I grew up in Victorville, California, out in the desert. My mother and father both worked hard, and neither one of them finished high school. Dinner some nights was government cheese and dried milk, and I didn't know we were poor. It just looked like dinner to me. Some nights my mom would push back from the table and say she wasn't feeling well, and she'd have a couple pieces of bread while the rest of us ate. I was a grown man before it landed on me that she was never sick. There wasn't enough food, and she was making sure her kids didn't notice. My dad helped me with my math homework at that same table, on the nights he was home to do it, and he said one thing over that homework so many times I can still hear it: "You don't want to work hard, like I do." He meant it as a warning and a hope at the same time.
Around 2007 a late-night infomercial sold me on real estate, and I did what a computer guy does: I studied. I read a real-estate finance manual cover to cover, twice. I found a four-plex that worked from every angle I checked, and I checked every angle. I told the owner I'd send him my offer. I never sent it. I couldn't find anything wrong with the deal, so I decided something must be wrong with it. The truth is I was too afraid to fail. What finally got me moving was a hand-lettered sign I passed in January of 2010, at the Jurupa off-ramp in Ontario, California: "Real estate investor seeks student." I called the number. On April first of that year I was laid off, and by early summer I'd joined the investment club behind that sign. Over 2010 and 2011 I lost two houses of my own to foreclosure. I learned this business from inside the wreck of it, which is a strange place to learn anything, but it's where I learned.
For years I carried a goal I never said out loud right: retire my dad. He worked so many hours I barely knew him. He was gone before I got up for school, and most nights he was still gone when I went to bed. "Retire my dad" stayed a wish for a long time, because I never made it a real question. Then one day, years into the business, I finally asked him what it would actually take. He said the only thing he really worried about was the house payment: "If something happens to me, I want the house paid off for your mom." So I asked for the number, the balance on the mortgage. When he said it, I was floored. I had that money sitting in the bank, and a deal I'd just closed had brought home more than half of it on its own. I called my sister to tell her I was paying off the house, and she offered to help. Together we paid it off, and he retired. I'd carried the wish for years. A single real estate deal is all it took.
Today I'm starting over in Texas. I left a built business behind in California, and I'm rebuilding, in public this time. My mission is cultivating growth. My faith shapes how I treat every person I work with. It opens doors, and it never blocks one.
what's a Gutsy Leader? →TJ