I had a conversation recently with a recruiter friend and they used a phrase to describe me that I hadn’t realized was applicable – first generation professional.
And it’s true. Both of my grandfathers grew up as farmers. My father’s father grew up in a 1-room house with a dirt floor as sharecropper in Oklahoma and spent his career as an enlisted man in the Army Air Corps and then the Airforce. My mother’s father grew up on an almond farm in northern California and spent his career as a door to door salesman and then a teacher before inventing one of the first phonics systems to help farmworker’s kids learn to read… and completely failing to make a successful business out of it.
My dad grew up on army bases and picked cotton and strawberries during the summer to help the family pay bills for much of his childhood. Just as he was about to go to college, dad was sent to Vietnam in a stupid racist imperialist war that shattered his confidence and left him with crippling PTSD. He spent his working life as a handyman.
I grew up one of 5 kids, living right on the edge of the poverty line. When I graduated high school, I had the test scores and grades to go anywhere I wanted, but I didn’t have the money. My parents couldn’t even afford to help me with college application fees, let alone tuition. So I worked my way though community colleges and was 27 by the time I finally earned my BA from San Francisco State (incidentally one of the top ranked schools in the country for my major… but a State school so it gets no respect from tech recruiters). That was only possibly because when I was 23 my dad was finally diagnosed with PTSD and started receiving disability benefits that included free tuition at a state school for me. It was HARD. I’ve been homeless, sleeping in a park all day after working the night shift. I’ve eaten out of dumpsters to avoid starvation. I’ve gone through things that most of the people I know professionally would only ever encounter in their nightmares. And I am here anyway because of my sheer tenacity and refusal to give up – and because of a few people along the way who lent a hand.
When I joined my first startup back in 2011, I was the first person in my family – after more than 20 generations since the Clearances sent our people to North America at gunpoint – to have a white collar job. And I am very very good at my job. In the 12 years since, I’ve had 4 exits, launched a long string of successful programs and products, and created millions of dollars in revenue and value for the companies I’ve worked with. All while being told I wasn’t good enough for bigger companies that from companies that “only recruit people from the best schools” (yes that’s an actual quote I’ve heard from recruiters more than once). As though that was a quality standard and not just classist bigotry.
So when you find yourself wondering why this particular white guy is so interested in building diverse teams, this is why. I want to hire people who’ve worked harder than their peers, people with grit, people who understand the meaning of struggle. People who are capable of so much more than the world has been willing to give them. People who earned what they have and haven’t spent their lives coasting along on privilege. Because at the end of the day, those are my people and I will pick them over the ivy leaguers and frat boys every day of the week.
I am a first generation professional. And if it sounds like I have a chip on my shoulder, it’s only because I do. I came to scrap. And I’m looking for folks willing to fight for working class people like us to get a fair shot.
Join me.