From the Beginning

Depression can be unrelentingly torturous.

(~30 minute read)
I’ve battled with depression for over 15 years, and in 2021 it took grip of my mind and held it over a void of a black hole, where I questioned if my life was worth it; and what even it was. This Introduction is an expanded version of a journal entry that I made in early 2022 after going through intense therapy, where I was forced to question the fabric of my own being, immobilized as I searched for a purpose—a purpose and meaning for nearly everything because my will to live came to a screeching halt. At a time when everything about my life was the best it had ever gone, for no apparent reason, I all of the sudden couldn’t continue going.

I thought of my childhood. My instinct has always been to push myself—especially when people told me I couldn’t have, get, or do something. I had this weird juxtaposition with authority too. It seemed like no matter where it came from or what it was in my life, I would both blindly trust whatever I was told was true and right, but I also didn’t want to conform to the majority. Oftentimes either I felt myself thinking that there were some things that everyone else seemed to understand that confused me or other things that I questioned really, really deeply that nobody else seemed to care about. I would be skeptical and think some things were being hidden from me: like a façade or charade. It felt like either I was never good enough, or there were “powers that be'' that kept me from things, so I would close off and hyperfocus to prove them wrong. Them could have been a person, a group of people, an institution, a system, an idea, beliefs, or stigmas. And I didn’t know where it was coming from. Whether it was a desire to be the best or chaos to break everything down, I just knew things needed to be… different.

I felt like I was always punching up. I am smaller in physical stature. So, with sports like soccer and baseball, I obsessed over the methodologies and strategies to create advantages around the edges—to try to understand the micro and macro elements of those sports, my position, my teams', and competitors. If I couldn’t win with brute force, then I looked to finesse. While on and off the field, I would run through thousands of scenarios and situations on how I would need to react during each or what I could do to proactively impact the flow. I practiced, trained, and dragged myself through self-inflicted obstacles. I would force myself through struggles to get better.

My earliest memories as a young kid are kicking a ball against our house as hard as I could to receive it back. In the yard, I would juggle a soccer ball without it hitting the ground to get over 100 then 300 then 500. The old high school soccer field was behind Virginia Pine Apartments where I grew up in Sikeston, Missouri. I would go there to practice dribbling and shoot at the goal on weekends, in the freezing cold with hard ground or when it was raining with a wet surface, when the grass was taller, on pavement, sand, and gravel, early in the morning and late at night; all to understand how the ball reacted in every natural environment. I went to school with ankle weights, ran in the summer with dumbbells and jumped in the apartment pool afterwards to swim laps. I would engross myself with highlight reels of Best Goals and video games like FIFA to improve my overall game IQ, identify patterns, learn from the best, and be able to see the future that I assumed was much similar to how top chess players knew their own and their competitors' moves way in advance.

I wasn’t pushed by anyone to do those things. I didn’t come from a family with money, so it’s not like I had access to the best equipment and training facilities either. As a young kid I got the nickname Speedy because of how fast I was, then later on there was Twinkle Toes because I had used duct tape to keep my cleats from falling apart. I would play in rec, get invited to travel teams and all-stars, and often hitch rides with other families or ride my bike to games and practice.

The thing is, my family, my school, and my town weren’t too fond of soccer past middle school. It was considered a “girl’s sport.” The “real men” played football. I felt like an outcast. But I wore it like a badge of pride, a chip on my shoulder that I could take something no one gave much attention to and give it greatness. When I got to high school, I was one of two freshmen on varsity, eventually became a captain, and Sikeston’s soccer team went from never having a winning season to back-to-back district championships onto state.

This obsessiveness and desire not to conform, or to confront rejection, or to exceed expectations bled into other areas of my life. As a young kid I’d get drafted to older baseball leagues to play for teams. I had the same tendencies to excel and push myself in baseball as I did soccer. The same vigilance to dive incredibly broad and deep to overcome any weaknesses and strive for greatness. I was the lead-off hitter for teams that won three district and two state championships, with one year being one game away from the Cal Ripken World Series. I’ll save the details that were similar to soccer, and just note that it seemed like anything that caught my curiosity got the same sensational passion. Passion that was driven by the desire to upend norms, because maybe, just maybe, I could find truth when it felt like what I saw or was told may not be the way things actually are or should be.

Sikeston is known for the Jaycee Bootheel Rodeo. Naturally, most people liked country music. So, I started a punk band. In the seventh grade, we were on top of the world when the principal let us play in the gym during the last week. In eighth grade, the four of us scraped together two hundred bucks to record a three-song “album” at a local music studio. I don’t think we made our money back selling the cd’s, but we thought we were destined for stardom. In the ninth grade, I got signatures from hundreds of students and teachers that petitioned for a year-end event and we got to rock out on the last day of school. Looking back, playing Saints and Sailors by Dashboard Confessional, the lyrics seem pretty proleptic.

This is where I say I've had enough
No one should ever feel the way that I feel now.
A walking open wound, a trophy display of bruises
And I don't believe that I’m getting any better.
Well don't be a liar.
Don't say that everything's working when everything's broken,
And you smile like a saint but you curse like a sailor.
And you might say the jokes on me.

School seemed easy up to junior high, always getting straight A’s, but ninth grade was a tough one for life-at-home. At the end of the year, my guidance counselor said I’d never be able to make it to the top 10% by the 12th grade to be considered for scholarships into college. I then held this personal vendetta, and somehow made it by graduation.

Whether it was physical, mental, or societal, I always felt a tug to go against the grain and work exhaustively to succeed and prove that I could be at the same level of those that were deemed "better" or had "more" than me. It was less playing victim, and more so feeling like fighting as an underdog. I felt a sense of personal responsibility in every aspect of my life to take control of the situation and raise it to the next level. In early childhood into my teenage years, I felt like I could achieve anything or get really good at something, but there was always a ceiling from being great.

After High School

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I got a scholarship to play soccer at a small NAIA university, Lindenwood in St. Charles, Missouri. NAIA is a unique division where there isn’t an age limit, so colleges would often get international pro-am players when they came to America in their late 20’s for school. I met some incredible Eastern European guys and my worldview started to open up. You could say training was intense: three-a-day practices, needing to eat 7,000 calories a day to not go into a caloric deficit, and treading water in a pool with a group of seven other teammates passing 10 pound bricks over our heads to gain stamina. In one game, as I was running as fast as I could to get a loose ball, a guy (what seemed like effortlessly) blazed past me. This is when I realized maybe I didn’t have what it took to make it to Major League Soccer. I didn’t get much time to dwell, because the next game I broke my ankle. This coming after a fracture from skateboarding as a teenager, the doctor recommended I maybe try something other than impact sports.

So I decided to go back home and work for my dad. My grandfather was a master mechanic. My father learned how to work on cars, became a painter, and eventually opened his own business in 1979. It was a small shop with about five employees. I started off washing cars, realized I couldn’t fix a dent to save my life, so eventually moved up to managing parts, and then production.

From two divorces growing up, I had some normal teenager hard feelings towards my dad. But one thing I had to credit him with was work ethic. He may have forgotten to pick me up from school all too many times and missed some important games, but I at least saw in him a person who just put their head down and worked. It rubbed off on me. I’d do landscaping for money or have soccer training for kids who had well-off parents. Growing up within a small family business environment gave me insights into creating and delivering value.

I learned to run and grow that business over a couple of years. It was tough. The Financial Crisis had just happened. We were chasing checks to keep payroll. I stopped taking payment for a while to help the business stay afloat. I remember looking down one day and I had -$9 in my bank account.

During that time, I read a book, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, that completely changed my perspective on life. In it, the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley has the line, “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” It sparked something in me that made me want to break through any limitations I had put on myself with getting from good to great. Though my dad made me work for it, I realized I didn’t want to be handed anything. I wanted to create something myself. So I decided to give college another try and entered into a track of entrepreneurship while still working at the shop. This is when life really took me by the horns.

Intro to Startups and Tech

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I met a professor at the local university, Dr. James Stapleton, who had started and built the entrepreneurship department and innovation center. A past serial entrepreneur for a couple decades, he decided to get his doctorate to teach. And we clicked. He too came from a small town, but in Kansas. His father was a mechanic who owned his small business, and James eventually left to do his own thing. Down to dysfunctional family dynamics, we had eerily similar backgrounds.

While I had made the decision that I wanted to start my own company, I also came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to do it strictly to make money. I wanted to help people - and more importantly, help people to help themselves or others. But I was of course motivated by becoming financially wealthy, so nonprofits didn’t spark my interest. My only exposure to them at the time were things like local civic groups that seemed to just have lunch together once a month and I didn’t really understand what they were even doing.

One of the first things James did was give me a book, Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. About storytelling, in it there is a short snippet on fundraising research. To paraphrase, one group tried to raise money for 3 million facing famine in Africa while another group raised money with the focus being on a little girl and how it would provide her meals and education. The second group’s average individual donation was double that of the first group.

The timing of learning about this seemed like fate. For a while I had been chronicling my newfound mission. With a blog titled Give Like A Millionaire, I had begun writing with the concept of sharing what I was learning to build an audience to eventually find ways to pull our small amounts of money and resources together so that it would have as much impact as if a millionaire were to be giving.

What I didn’t know at the time, was that this concept of pooling little amounts of money together from a larger number of people for a very specific thing had been bubbling up and actually had a term: crowdfunding. It quickly became a new flashy buzzword, and with James’ workings with federal agencies, he had a bit of early knowledge before the Obama administration passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. It eventually led to me attempting to start my first tech company.

Within a matter of weeks I had stumbled into opportunities that far surpassed anything I could have imagined. I went to a small business workshop and met someone who introduced me to a business owner. I went to a Chamber of Commerce event and was introduced to another business owner. All of the sudden, I found myself with a group of individuals offering me a combined $150,000 to start this company. I thought I was on to something world-changing.

James eventually introduced me to The Lean Startup by Eric Ries and the work of Steve Blank. He urged me to test small, iterate, and learn as fast as possible to grow. Instead of taking that $150,000, James offered me $20,000 and said he would accept any terms I gave him. “I don’t care about the money,” he said. I of course now realize how fortunate I was to even have an opportunity such as that.

I worked plenty of 100 hour weeks. I sold my car and put everything I had into that startup. I would read anything I could get my hands on. I was devouring knowledge and pouring myself out into new experiences. At one point I was trying to go to college, help my father run his business, and launch this startup. My mother attempted suicide during these months several times and was under my care alone in the beginning. A therapist at the time told me they thought I was trying to do too many things at the same time.

The juxtaposition was still there.

Just as in early-life, I began questioning authoritative and institutional knowledge and wisdom that I had trusted and created my identity from. I eventually stripped away all materialistic things and my self to pursue “greatness”. I got rid of my tv, donated clothes, threw away non-necessities, stopped every extracurricular activity, and beat my ego senseless to put all of my eggs into the basket of being great at business. I began to distance myself from those foundations and institutions as well. I dropped out of college. I moved away from religion. I left the family business.

But I guess I wasn’t business savvy enough, or the company NTHfluence would be just as a household name as Kickstarter or GoFundMe. The startup culture had hooked me though, so I tried again. I pulled together a dev and designer I’d met where the next concept we interviewed to enter an accelerator program in Seattle and another concept we were pitching a hardware investor to use his technology to create an IoT platform. We were young, inexperienced, without much of a network of people who had built tech companies before, but we were naive enough to try creating something from nothing.

What I learned throughout those experiences was that I really enjoyed the high-level concepts of entrepreneurship, innovation, startups, and technology. I had never been exposed to these things before. Whether it was tech startups themselves, especially the methodologies of Lean and Design Thinking, simple tools such as the Business Model Canvas that came out of Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation, or what I consider heavy lifts with the work from Larry Keeley in Ten Types of Innovation.

Through all of this I had also worked with James on a concept with the university for a downtown building redevelopment project with the purpose of creating a space where students could learn to startup their own companies. Unfortunately, our vision got overruled and it eventually got turned into an art and hospitality project, so I lost interest.

Realizing no one else around me had ever discovered these concepts, these tools, or these opportunities, I then began to wonder if there was a way for me to share them with others to help them start and innovate their own companies. Maybe I could help others to eventually help myself. I emailed James and about ten other people who I had admired through these experiences, and asked them if they would be interested in starting a group to work on this.

But being a college dropout with no money after a couple of startup attempt failures, I also realized I probably needed a way to survive, so I should probably go ahead and just get a job. I applied for one position. It was with the software company that I had used to run my dad’s body shop. Called Mitchell International at the time, it was based out of San Diego, and was one of the top three companies in North America to help body shops and insurance companies with software management for vehicle accidents.

My past experience with the body shop and using that very software for years made it a pretty easy hiring process. But I was certainly out of place. An early 20’s kid from a small town, with a group of late 30-50’s experienced corporate sales guys and managers. The week Mitchell sent me a job offer, James sent me an email. “Hey Chris, I’d like to see if you’d be interested in starting something together. Let me know when you’re free to chat.”

I felt like I couldn’t pass either up. Starting a company with James sounded incredible, but this job opportunity could be life changing for me too. Not only was it an insanely well-paying job, but I would get to learn what it was like to work in a large-scale enterprise tech company, and even get to work with their newly formed innovation team. The company wanted me to move to Nashville. So I made an agreement with James. I would accept the position at Mitchell, but I would put everything I made into starting a company with him, and I would travel back every weekend to work on the new business.

We would meet at the local library and begin discussing what it was that we were even going to do. We didn’t know what this thing was. We mainly connected on a few mantras that all fed into the desire of helping create opportunities for people who may not otherwise have had access to them - focusing on startups and tech because that is what interested us most. We had some slogans:

Collaboration over competition

Community over agenda

Doing over saying

Innovators over institutions

And that’s what led to us starting Codefi.

Fast Forward Seven Years

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In 2021, a poorly treated depression and anxiety, mostly curbed by self-medication with alcohol, brought me to my knees. I had battled with it throughout life, but I always found ways to “outwork” it. I’d follow extremely strict diets, workout six days a week, practice mindfulness and sleep hygiene, take cold showers, different homeopathic remedies, and just overload myself with work so that my brain didn’t even have the time to think about things. Tim Ferris became an idol of mine with his books and then podcast; how he guinea pigged himself, short-circuited mastery, and tested thousands of different things to increase performance and productivity, but his blog, How to Commit Suicide in particular resonated with me.

I’d sought help from multiple different psychologists and psychiatrists specializing in different types of therapies: from CBT to journaling, EMDR to neurofeedback. I was prescribed over twenty different medications within a decade trying to diagnose and treat the symptoms and root causes. Acronyms were abundant: SSRIs, SNRIs, ADHD, OCD, SAD, MDD, PTSD, on and on and on. But for some reason in 2021, I just… broke.

It was unlike any depression and anxiety I had ever had. Society is getting better to where mental illness isn’t seen as such a taboo, but it truly is difficult to understand if you haven’t experienced it. The analogy I gave to James was, “it’s like if I just snapped my femur in half and you asked me to go run a 5K with you. I physically would not be able to do that.” I physically and mentally could not get out of bed or off my couch.

Fortunately, with James as a business partner, he told me to take a month away from the business to take care of myself. We had 20 employees, probably 30-40 counting part-time and subcontractors. I began questioning if I had put the right structures in place—questioning if I was the right person to be leading Codefi. I integrated back into work after a few weeks and battled with this inner turmoil for a few months.

Why was I feeling this sense of hopelessness and dread? Newly married to the woman of my dreams, getting the business to point where it seemed like we had things figured out, my first pup Luke who had become my best friend and stayed with me 24/7, we lived in a small but quaint home, and we would travel twice a year to national parks to see the beauty of the world. If anything, for the first time in my life, everything was calm and I should have been more content and happy than ever before. Was it burnout? Had I been pursuing the wrong things? Was I comparing myself against unreasonable expectations and measurements? Deep down, did I just feel like I wasn’t enough?

I was reading Principles by Ray Dalio and came across the term meritocracy. *A meritocracy is a government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability. I thought, “this is what I thought I'd been searching for.” I’ve felt like the underdog all my life, that I’ve had a disdain for those who think they are superior because of size, knowledge, because of class, because of money, because of societal constructs that felt like a façade to me and an even more disdain for those that accepted mediocrity. I wanted to be measured, and measure people on their ability to do. It gave me a glimpse of hope that I may have stumbled upon the root cause of my depression and anxiety, that it may have stemmed from not having a frame of reference for what was “right” or “enough” - from not truly understanding who I was, or needed and wanted, or should or ought to be and do.

So I decided a meritocracy was what I would implement at Codefi to know I am doing things right, to provide guidance on how we are World Class (one of my constant talking points to our team), what we expect of others, and how we begin to measure how we’re impacting others’ lives. I created new tools and frameworks for our team that were ultimately helping me process how I had done things; and to hopefully help them manage their own uncertainties as we were building our company together.

But after exploring a true meritocracy, I realized there were some serious flaws to such a system. That inherently, people are going to be born with more opportunities than others, so naturally that would self-select the people who had access to those opportunities and were able to take advantage of them the most. Luck or happenstance played a major role. So I went back to questioning everything and searching for answers, for anything to give me the ability to continue and not fail myself and everyone around who I felt I owed a responsibility to.

The Philosophical Rabbit Hole

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I tried to set aside my struggles with depression and motivation for the time being - and think through where ideally I would be ‘back to normal’, not immobilized, and striving for greatness. My thoughts had been consumed by “am I doing things right”? As in, “am I managing people the right way?“. It led me down the path of what different ways there are. ie We have figureheads like Steve Jobs known to be visionaries, creatively brilliant yet personally abrasive.

So, do I march forward in search of exceptionalism, pushing those who work with me to the brink of- or to break through- their own mental barriers? Should we do this without hesitation for how it makes others feel - including those people themselves or anyone impacted by the work we do - or is there a different approach that doesn’t seem so demanding? But I just continued to wrestle with these questions, because how do you find answers to be more authentic and effective when your own mind feels like it’s being ripped apart and can’t even define what those very things had been, were, what I thought they could or should or ought to be?

It was at this time that I got pre-authorized to participate in a new program passed by the FDA for a drug called Spravato (Esketamine). Eskatamine is a form of ketamine, which is a dissociative anesthetic that has been used for many years in procedures needing anesthesia. However, a new use-case had been discovered to help with treatment resistant depression by acting on the brain’s glutamate system—different from any medication on the market that had been used for decades mainly focused on increasing or decreasing the three main chemicals of dopamine, norepinephrine, or serotonin.

But it would require a serious time commitment. I would need to be driven to and from sessions at a clinic in another town twice a week for a month, once a week for the next month, and then once every other week during what is called an Induction Phase of their Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy. It was a highly controlled substance. I would need to stay at the health facility for at least two hours every session, and I would be incapacitated those days so I could not work. James graciously agreed to me pursuing this treatment knowing it would again take me away from the company.

Those sessions took everything I had been battling with for years, especially the struggles most recently, and forced me to face them head on. But for the first time in what seemed like years, I finally had relief. With it being a psychoactive drug, it allowed me to think and process very abstract and complex things. A potential bad side effect of the medicine can be dissociation, but I would call what I experienced as association. I felt more connected. But these sessions also took my psyche to places I had never fully explored, and probably didn’t have the mental capacity or know how to do so.

It led me to a path of questioning from “am I doing things right” to “am I doing the right things?” If you read that again, you’ll see there’s quite a difference between them. “Am I doing things right” versus “am I doing the right things.” It started with internal business management, but very quickly turned to external, as in Codefi; if what we were trying to accomplish was “right”.

We were trying to cultivate opportunity for those who may not otherwise have had that opportunity by creating and delivering programs and resources so that people around here could start their own tech companies or work for a tech company. My belief was that it’s a right purpose because of the economic impact; the mental and emotional freedom and fulfillment it not only has on the individual, but what it can have on their family, and the community.

I’d felt like entrepreneurship and technology are two incredibly accessible gateways that give literally anyone the chance to put fate in their own hands—to create their own versions of what the world should be if they had their own battles with authority, institutions, and society. It gives them freedom to choose what they do with their life. With both technology and/or entrepreneurship, you can create nearly anything your mind comes up with. People from any background, geography, race, creed, education level, or any other identity noun can improve their quality of life no matter where they started or where they are.

But my train of thoughts didn’t stop. As I was thinking through ‘am I doing the right things’ I began questioning, “What is right?” And “why is that right?” “Who decided that and how do I know for sure that it’s right?” But I couldn’t find answers. Because in order for me to, it deserved deeper questions. Just as in early life, I became sensationally curious about these questions, and it was as if I couldn’t keep going on with life or make any decisions until I had answers.

It was like sitting at a crossroads and not being able to choose a direction, because of the fear of choosing wrong and heading in the opposite direction of where you should actually go. But it was more than just a crossroads. There were infinite possibilities.

So I asked, “what’s the end goal?” “What am I even trying to achieve?” “What is Codefi trying to accomplish?”

But I couldn’t stop. If I had to identify the end goal, I needed to determine the purpose of it all.

Which led me to ask, “What is the purpose?”

And then, “What is my purpose?”

It exploded to, “What is humanity’s purpose?”

The spiraling continued to, “Why is there… purpose?”

I had recently watched a Reddit Live feed of a scientist with a microscope live streaming 100x magnification. I began to think about watching that tardigrade, which was so small and it was essentially reacting to stimuli - feeding to survive.

Grow outward from there. As you get larger and larger, more and more complex, you get to humans who have mostly been very similar. We eat and reproduce to continue our species’ existence. Most of people’s purposes throughout history - their duty or responsibilities - have just been to do those things. Their purpose for the day was to find food to survive until tomorrow.

Humanity has grown to where, in most fortunate situations, society provides much more access to provide where our basic needs are met. So we begin to have existential questions. I understood these thoughts were nothing new. It’s probably where philosophy, religion, astronomy, and physics all began - everyone trying to find out how we began or why things are the way they are.

I was questioning why we continue.

If there is conception of life and to continue existing the purpose is to feed, survive, and reproduce, and we’re continuing that trend with new found purposes of increasing that velocity while solving problems that arise—what happens when we get to the ‘end’? If all human basic needs were met.. If we found a way to harness the energy of the universe.. If there was no suffering.. If we discovered ways to be immortal. Then what? What is purpose?

To New Beginnings

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I concluded, like a hammer will never be able to question why it was created to hit a nail on the head or what its purpose will be in the future, these are questions we may never be able to answer even if humans are sentient. Or using the analogy that we’ve been placed in a soccer game. There are predefined rules that we just absolutely cannot change. In the game, going out of bounds means I lose possession and bringing a guitar to play at mid-field is meaningless.

I held on to sanity by coming to terms with our purpose being - to be. We can’t control when we were created… who we are... where we are. We only have consciousness during the abysmally small amount of time we are here. And we have to create our own meaning from that with the circumstances that are around us during that time.

I questioned if this was profound or rhetorical.

I then came across David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. In the book, it is shared that as far as we know, humans are uniquely special. Humans are the only things in the universe with the ability to create knowledge. And not only to create knowledge, but to build upon that knowledge. Throughout the entire physical reality around us, we are the only things capable of that.

David goes on to speak on how the Enlightenment period was a revolutionary time in human history, because for the first time, as a species we began to critique anthropomorphic reasoning and identify true explanations of the world around us and we have been continuing to do that ever since. He proposes that there will always be problems, but given the right knowledge all problems are soluble. Thus, through fallibilism, we can make sense of the world around us and make infinite progress. That book was formidable for me.

I had concluded that our purpose is to be. And if we’d like, we can continue with life by creating meaning from what we do.

So What Do We Do?

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Unlike my ambition to compartmentalize literally everything in my life, and my devotion and obsessiveness to continually get better, these questions are like brainstorm sessions that never end. They’re not black and white. I feel like my anxiety and depression has come from not being certain on what is right. And it comes from two places: #1 A fear of ignorance and #2 A fear of being unaware.

For #1, I’ve gone through life and had strong opinions, made statements, and acted in ways that I look back now and view as ignorance - I view them in shame with regret. I don’t want to repeat that. With #2, there’s the concern of both imposter syndrome and delusions of grandeur. I don’t want to view myself as more important, superior, to be making more of an impact, or view myself as being more productive, valuable, or loved than I truly am.

I yearn for truth. And it’s a dilemma, because as Josh Waitzken eloquently writes in his book The Art of Learning, (paraphrasing), “there is a phase of learning where you feel you are falling uncontrollably.” The thing is, I’ve felt more comfortable when I’ve been able to fail and those tests are self-contained. I controlled the test variables and constants when I created obstacles to enhance my soccer skills. But now? My actions affect other people. Every decision I make, every move I take, impacts someone else in some way. I needed ways to work through that.

It seems silly as I write it out and say it out loud. I have 20 employees. Not 100, or 10,000. What’s been somewhat comforting is I’ve been told starting a company is just as hard as hiring the first 10 is just as hard as hiring the first 50 is just as hard as hiring the next 100. The problems and questions don’t necessarily grow exponentially or even linearly with the number of people.

The original purpose we set out for with Codefi: to create opportunities for those who may not otherwise have had them. I began to become more confident and satisfied with that being where I created meaning from with my life.

I began to understand that there is also no “end” to that being a purpose. No number will ever be satiating enough, there will always be more to do, and finding enjoyment in the process and moment—to be—can be sufficient.

My experiences led to thoughts that much like I’ve battled with depression, anxiety, and existential crisis, that small towns and rural communities—from individuals and organizations within them, throughout the regions themselves—have and are going to continue to experience the same. With declining populations, lack of access to resources, lower economic prosperity and mobility, quality of life and opportunities, if they haven’t already, they may begin to question their own “purpose” before they become obsolete. From what I’ve seen, mimicking the period of depression that eventually led me to being immobilized, many people, organizations, and communities have made no meaningful progress the past few decades.

In recent years, there has been a massive influx of questions, funding, and initiatives dedicated to helping small towns and rural communities start and grow tech-based economies and provide a new purpose. This is the very work I’ve poured myself into for the past decade, and we’ve seen impact and successes, some faster and greater, than a lot of other similar organizations and communities of the same size trying to do the same.

My goal isn’t to tout our success. My hope is that the individuals, founders, workers, support organizations, and policymakers—with my own coming-of-age—understand that small towns and rural communities are at the cusp of New Beginnings. We can’t just do what has always been done. To me, for there to be so many people and places with declining qualities of life, that means the leadership and existing institutions have failed us. We need new ideas and new people for a breath of fresh air. But we also cannot just replicate what has worked in metropolitan areas, because we lack the same foundations, infrastructure, knowledge, assets, and amenities. So we need to consider the unique challenges and opportunities specific to us. We need to question authority, force ourselves to ask about purpose and meaning, and think deeply about what is “right.” I’d like to share how I’ve done that personally, with our company and how we have, are, and will continue to help others under times of extreme uncertainty, and zooming out, asking larger questions so that similar people may do the same.