Are you a geek?
There’s a moment in life when you realize—without a doubt—that you are, in fact, a geek. For some, it happens when they find themselves deep in a Reddit rabbit hole at 2 AM. For others, it’s the day they can name every Star Trek captain in order. For me? Well, I never had a choice. I was born into it.
The dictionary defines a geek as “a person who is very interested in and knows a lot about a particular subject.” That’s a bit mild, isn’t it? Geeks don’t just know a lot; they obsess over details that most people overlook. We live for the challenge, the curiosity, the endless possibilities that technology presents. It’s not a label—it’s a way of life.
I’ve always been a chic geek, not just someone fascinated by technology, but someone who embraced it with style. Growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley, I was the son of an engineer. Trying to escape the tech world? Impossible. Our house was a shrine to innovation. While other kids were playing outside, I was inside, building Heathkit stereo systems with my dad. We weren’t just consumers of technology—we were creators.
One of my favorite memories was heading to Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale, CA. Picture a sprawling labyrinth of discarded circuit boards, forgotten processors, and endless bins of electronic parts. Sorting through that chaos was half the fun. The other half? Haggling with the warehouse managers to shave a few dollars off the price of a motherboard. It was like a treasure hunt—except the treasure was obsolete IBM parts and the thrill came from building something amazing out of nothing.
We weren’t just piecing together computers—we were building our own personal tech empires. We learned every DOS command before Windows was even a thing. We partitioned hard drives, arguing for hours about the most efficient way to do it. Every detail mattered. Every tweak felt like an innovation.
And we used to laugh when people bought a Mac from a little company called Apple. “Do they even know how much they’re overpaying?” we’d joke. Macs were sleek, sure, but real geeks knew better. They built their own machines, customized them down to the very last jumper setting.
That foundation led me to help build and sell two companies that powered the future of the internet’s backbone infrastructure. The curiosity, the love of tinkering, the relentless drive to innovate—those were the things that set the stage for everything that came next.
So, are you a geek? If you’ve ever spent hours debating the best Linux distro, if you’ve ever taken apart a gadget just to see how it works, if you feel that irresistible pull toward what’s next in tech—then welcome to the club. We don’t just use technology. We build it. We shape it. We live it.
And the best part? The adventure never stops.