Jefferson II
It's fashionable (and ignorant) in 2024 to castigate founders like Thomas Jefferson as misogynistic and racist but he became an inspiration for me in 2012 after I visited the Rotunda in Charlottesville. In my estimation, Jefferson accomplished more social good after he turned sixty years old than before.
Sure, history focuses on the Declaration of independence but Jefferson saw the implicit inefficiency of the British caste system and eliminated it from the United States with the public university system . He was 76. Two hundred years ago, Jefferson promoted a meritocracy truth which evolved into the greatest empire in history.
If I can kick off the concept of impedence-matched currencies at 66 years old, I will accomplish my own version of Jefferson's old age and die a happy guy.
I conversed with ChatGBT today about the annual DEFCON hacker conference in Las Vegas, now in its 31st year. This year's conference had 100+ speakers. The early conferences were much smaller so a total of 3,100 presentations (31 years x 100) is a safe assumption.
Chat gave an estimate of 4 million hands-on IT workers in the US now with a 4 million turnover over 31 years, or 8 million. So the average DEFCON presenter is 0.04% of IT workers. I'm a three-time presenter which puts me into a more rarified group, probably under 0.02% or 1 in 5000.
I am a 1 in 5000 occurrence.
An anomaly.
I refuse to be sidelined because of my age.
In 1990, my Teradyne manager said I was too old to change careers into software. Since that insulting comment:
1991-1994, Aspen in 40 States ,$60 million saved in year one.
1996, letter of commendation from USDOT
1998-2000, Supportlogix has earned around $100 million
2001-2004, Q2O transacted $1.5 billion in its first year
2004, my website, RealMeme.com in the top 100,000 websites
2005-7, DEFCON presentations on data mining
2008, Boeing letter of commendation
2011-2012, principal architect offers from Aetna, T-mobile, Tata
2016, DLVR real-time analytics running petabytes per month
2018, Sila Money, $21 million in venture capital
2023, Gold Token paper, 16 Depository bills submitted, 30x increase over the previous seven years.
I'm not done yet.