The Idea That Started Everything

In 2011 I was a junior at Trinity College studying international studies. I won a Davis Projects for Peace grant with two classmates — $10,000 plus another $4,850 we raised from the college — to go to rural Karnataka, India and build rainwater collection systems on schoolhouses.

The problem was fluoride. The groundwater in Pavagada had fluoride levels high enough to cause fluorosis — a disease that destroys teeth and bones. The kids at these schools were drinking it every day because there was nothing else.

We partnered with a local NGO called BIRD K and built underground collection systems at five schools. Rooftop gutters into underground tanks made of bricks and cement, with hand pumps for distribution. We spent a month on-site. We formed student committees to maintain the systems after we left.

I was twenty years old. I remember a girl with brown spots on her front teeth that matched her skin. I promised myself I would come back and solve this problem. It was a wish that I would become more.

Seven Years Later

By 2018 I had made money in early Ethereum, moved to Los Angeles, and spent two years trying to figure out how to actually build something that mattered. I assembled a team — a CEO who had raised $500 million across tech and entertainment, a CTO from Israeli Red Beret with a CS degree from University of Haifa, a PhD in supply chain optimization from SUNY Buffalo, a water scientist with a doctorate in atmospheric science. I hired Manatt, one of the top law firms in LA.

The project was called DRYP. A decentralized water utility platform.

The idea: use IoT sensors to create a digital signature of water quality — flow rate, electrochemical analysis, time and location stamps. Every liter of verified potable water mints a LITER token. Sellers broadcast availability to the network. Buyers find water providers on a web app, purchase tokens, receive a QR code, dispense water. The token burns on consumption.

The economics were the part I was proudest of. Pegged local pricing that prevents large producers from crushing small ones. Progressive fee structures that reward volume. Market forces that naturally push production to underserved areas — high token prices in water-scarce regions signal opportunity and attract producers. Communities can pool DRYP tokens to collectively invest in larger collection systems. And the whole thing runs on a blockchain so every transaction is transparent and trust doesn't depend on any single institution.

I spent about $150,000 — lawyers, the team, living expenses in LA while building it. I wrote a 19-page whitepaper. I believed completely.

What Went Wrong

Two things.

The obvious one: the scope was enormous. Hardware plus blockchain plus international NGO partnerships plus regulatory compliance across multiple countries. One founder's crypto earnings wasn't enough runway for what this needed. It needed $5 million and five years.

The less obvious one — and the one that took me years to understand: I was chasing power. I started with a noble goal but somewhere along the way the goal became a justification. As money came in and I saw how other people were living, I used Dryp as the story I told myself about why I deserved what I was pursuing. I was trying to raise money to territory-grab rather than build.

It's so easy to get caught up pursuing something and not realize why you're pursuing it anymore. While still convincing yourself you're doing it for the original reason. Because you need to think about yourself in a certain way. There's a constant need to watch for this in yourself. When you catch it, you realize your actions have gone wrong.

I ran out of money. The project didn't launch. I went home to Lincoln, Nebraska.

Learning to Code

I was broke again. Every startup I'd tried — Dryp, Academium with Nolan Bushnell, a marketing agency in LA — had burned through capital. I was sick of the crypto industry. The promise I'd seen in the technology had turned into penny stocks and Wolf of Wall Street speculation.

But the thing I couldn't shake was the technical gap. Every time I'd tried to build something, I'd had to rely on other people to execute. And relying on other people to execute your vision when you can't evaluate their work or understand the tradeoffs is a recipe for failure.

So I started learning CSS. Then JavaScript through Udemy. Then I got mentored by a developer who'd written backends for billion-dollar companies and built one of the first Blackberry apps. He gave me debugging tasks, DevOps work, data manipulation. Real production work. I was his hands when he got tired.

What I've Built Since

Since 2020 I've shipped over ten production products. A craft beer recommendation engine with Google Maps integration and a custom scoring algorithm. A real-time multiplayer game lobby that I open-sourced. A collaborative LLM chat platform with a full RAG pipeline — four different chunking strategies, overlapping windows, dynamic Handlebars templates — before most people knew what RAG was. A Chrome extension for subjective analysis that stores emotional and subject ratings as numeric scores to improve semantic retrieval. A 90,000-line crypto news platform with an entity glossary system that maps relationships between people, projects, and tokens to generate contextually accurate breaking news. A bodybuilding chatbot that I launched in two months and got to 100 users. A 67,000-line SaaS for design agencies with 86 database models, 312 API routes, and a 28-tool AI assistant. A marketing automation system with closed-loop AI research agents. An AI command center for solo founders that runs overnight and produces real work across multiple projects.

300,000+ lines of code. 3,790+ commits. Every project built on the last one.

The Part I Didn't See Coming

The concept I described in that 2018 whitepaper — IoT devices creating tokenized proof of physical resources in a decentralized marketplace — got a name in 2023. They call it DePIN now. Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks. It became a major crypto narrative. People raised millions for projects built on the same thesis.

I was five years early.

Where This Leaves Me

I don't have a neat ending for this story. I'm not going to tell you I'm about to go back and build Drip. I'm 34, I'm in Lincoln, and I'm focused on the projects that pay the bills and build the skills.

But I think about those kids in Karnataka. I think about the girl with the brown spots on her teeth. I wrote in a journal once: "I don't think there's a more important goal in the world than working on clean drinking water for humanity. And if I had my way that was what I would work on for the rest of my life."

Every project I've built since 2020 was training. The question is training for what.

I think I know. I'm just not ready yet. But I'm closer than I've ever been.