Full disclosure, this is not your typical founder’s blog and I am not your typical tech entrepreneur founder. My hope with this blog is to share the genesis of DatingPerfect, and in doing so, myself. This is more than a brand’s origin story. It is the inception of an idea within the context of a personal narrative, of a life. For better or worse, the ups and the downs.
Growing up in San Francisco, California was like an AP class in human sexuality. But more on that later, I promise. At 43 years old, I’ve been fortunate to have lived a lot of lives, traveled extensively, and experienced life in many places. Yet, the San Francisco Bay Area always calls me back. And my home today is Oakland, on a sailboat that I’m prepping for a trip around the world – One Day.
From Stripper to Tech Entrepreneur
I’ve also had many careers, from stripping to bartending, to construction and property management, to high-level software sales and development, to affordable-housing lobbying, various boards across multiple industries, and finally to the tech startup space – which I have enjoyed for the past ten years. These intersecting elements and experiences led me to start DatingPerfect with a close friend and brilliant technologist. Now, almost three years later, we have a game-changing piece of technology and a team of amazing people helping us all over the world.
A “tell-all” founders blog was actually never my plan. Quite the contrary, I thought we would quietly launch DatingPerfect, which would function smoothly and effectively, allowing us to help people find the date(s) they were seeking, thereby making us profitable. If I’m being honest, which I intend to do in a borderline uncomfortable manner, I have a little more to say. Like, throwing our wonderful and previous marketing strategist under the double-decker San Francisco tour bus. This self-revealing blog is her idea and I trust her implicitly. This is partially based on our friendship, but mostly it’s because she used to head digital marketing and social media at Playboy. Yes, that Playboy.
It’s All Just Unfolding
I don’t know where this story will go. There will be no thesis statement, no outline. There won’t be a careful rearranging before going to press. It will simply unfold, sort of like life. I won’t be directing or organizing the content of these posts in some decisive, predetermined way. I think life is the best storyteller; it has a way of lending sense and meaning to the most seemingly disparate themes.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll share myself with you as a way of disclosing the origin and development of DatingPerfect, which is inevitably bound up with my own story as a tech entrepreneur. Hopefully, there will be laughs, perhaps tears, as I let the contents of a life and the past versions of myself tumble onto the page: the dumpster-diving teenage runaway, the evolution of a complicated sexual worldview, the data scientist and technologist, the manic highs and desperate lows of startup culture, and a real fear of pirates and crocodiles. And no, I don’t have any tiger selfies – sorry Tinder fans.
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