A Dog’s Tale
I was a nerd in high school when I discovered Bitcoin. It was 2011, I loved video games, coding, spinning up crappy websites, and designing things in Photoshop. My family couldn’t afford much, but one thing my mom made sure we had was a desktop computer with an internet connection. So, with not a whole lot else to do, I pretty much grew up on the internet. It was only natural that I’d bump into Bitcoin along the way.
I saved several summers’ worth of odd job spare change to build my dream computer. Using a Radeon 6970, I mined a few 50 BTC blocks. Of course, I sold almost all of them for $10 or less per coin. What I didn’t sell for cheap got goxxed in 2013. That was okay though, I probably would have sold long before $10k. So, my first experience with Bitcoin was pumping the electric bill as an adolescent side income. Thanks mom.
As a broke college student, I chucked a little bit of my student loan into Bitcoin in 2015 (not much, but it got me back in the game). I continued to buy here and there for the coming years, sitting on it while I focused on school.
It wasn’t until late 2016 that it became really exciting again. When we started climbing back to $1000, I knew we were going to all time highs and beyond. That’s when I started spending all of my extra hours reading everything I could about trading Bitcoin.
In early 2017, I needed to sell a little bit of my stack to afford some books for school. Sure enough, my OTC dealer told me to check out “altcoins.” I had only ever thought of crypto as “Bitcoin,” and frankly, I didn’t understand why we needed anything else. Though I didn’t know what I was doing, my OTC dealer had been making some crazy money. Why not give it a try? After all, this nerd sure seemed to know what he was talking about.
I picked up some Ethereum for around $33 and within a couple months I had tripled my investment. Naturally I thought, “why the hell am I spending so much time on school for when I can get rich off crypto?”
I dove into crypto headfirst and spent all my free time consuming everything I could find. I wasn’t going to sacrifice my career, so every waking moment was dedicated to studying and research for school or learning everything I could about crypto. I searched every message board, forum, and community until I landed on Crypto Twitter.
I lurked for weeks until I began to get a sense of things. It was an amazing retreat from the stress of trading as well as the perfect medium to keep up with the fast paced industry that is crypto. I was hard pressed to find anyone I knew that understood how to trade, let alone had even heard of Bitcoin, but here were tens of thousands of people on the same journey I was. I began to love all of the people and characters in the space. So, I started The Crypto Dog to join in and connect with others to learn more about crypto and trading.
The rest of 2017 went by in a flash. It was an incredible time of late nights and early mornings, always keeping one eye open to check Blockfolio. Everyone was making money, and there seemed to be no end in sight.
In one of my first lectures at the beginning of 2018, another lab partner turned to me and said, “get out of here man, you know you’re wasting your time.” With that, I picked up my things and left.
To be honest, it was a long time coming. It wasn’t as simple as “crypto money, screw school” but the first step towards my dream of entrepreneurship. For so long in my life I had the security of knowing that in X years I’ll be making Y money, and after Z years of careful budgeting, I’ll pay off all of my loans. Then, after many years, I’d be comfortable.
Knowing my career path and how I’d spend the next several decades of my life had been comforting for awhile. I was going to leave behind the constant stress of money and fear of debt, climbing on up. Eventually I’d be able to afford a nice home, maybe an early retirement, so on and so forth.
Over time it began to feel like a trap. Knowing exactly where I’d be, what I’d be doing, and how much money I’d be making each year for decades started feeling like claustrophobia. So many aspects of my life were well plotted out, year after year.
It honestly began to terrify me. A majority of my lifetime decided ahead of time, spent working for others to make just enough to be comfortable but never become financially independent — at least not for decades.
I couldn’t accept the fate I had built myself. I took a hiatus from my doctorate program and a big risk spending a year going all in on becoming an entrepreneur. For months I floated on crypto savings, exploring different options until finally I found an opportunity I believed would change my life. I moved thousands of miles, leaving academia behind to work at a fledgling but well funded accelerator, a startup itself.
The beginning was thrilling. I was about to gain valuable experience and it felt like I was finally entering the real world. However, as the months passed and it became increasingly clear the opportunity I once had high hopes for wasn’t leading anywhere, I had to pivot all over again.
I moved on from that company by living off crypto again while focusing on my own startup, a startup related to my first passion before crypto based on an idea I had always wanted to build since my first year in undergrad. It’s up and running now, but I’ll share more details on that soon… I’m so excited to show it to you guys.
As fate would have it, soon after I started working for myself I met a team of young, like-minded entrepreneurs who had one focus: while working with innovative founders to start impactful companies.
From our first conversation, I knew I wanted to work with this team, a startup studio of passionate entrepreneurs focused on emerging industries. They loved my startup idea and wanted to get more involved in crypto. We talked for a couple months and by mid-2019 I began working with them as both partner and client. Since then, I’ve been working on a number of projects across esports, health and wellness, venture capital, and of course, cryptocurrency and blockchain.
I haven’t been able to share what I do offline until now, but now that it’s out, I can’t wait to start sharing more on what I’m doing in my life outside of being a crypto trading, sunglasses-clad dog.
Thank you guys for being a part of this journey.
-Dog
