I’m Jigar Patel. I live in Austin, TX with my wife Hanisha, and I help software eat the world.

My first ever computer was a 256mhz Gateway 2000 with 128mb of ram running Windows 95. My father purchased it for us without having really used a computer previously, but having seen that many people he knew were buying computers for home use at that time, it sounded like a good idea.

These were the nascent days of Web 1.0, with the typical path to the internet via a walled garden experience provided by AOL or Compuserve. Today, we might consider it a fairly limiting experience but given how small the overall footprint of the internet was at that time, it felt magical. There was no Wikipedia but Microsoft Encarta was a good standby, and effectively no social-media but anyone could make a Geocities page. Your own little corner of the internet was available to anyone, pursuant to a little bit of knowledge in html!

As a precocious and curious kid, I eventually got interested in games and as a not particularly good gamer, that led to an interest in reverse engineering games. Being a good reverse engineer, has a dependency on knowing how to code to a certain degree. After all, one has to work backwards to reverse engineer, examine the output, infer the input or more specifically, the logic to how the output was derived.

The ideal opportunity to learn came during a science fair when I was around 12. Instead of your bog-standard baking soda, vinegar pseudo-volcano, I decided to submit a computer program. Dynamic languages weren't as popular back then and given most games were written C or C++, I decided to pick up a book on C and try my hand at writing a basic grocery tabulator. To win a science fair it helps that no one else makes a submission in your category and it turns out no other middle-schooler had made a submission in the computer science category.

Such began a deep interest in technology and computing. I took a few detours along the way, but ultimately my curiosity, resourcefullness and persistence has helped numerous startups and SMBs focus on the things that matter, growing their business and generating revenue.