Don McGuire

When I decided to get the startup bug, I had three small children and a mortgage and a lot of responsibilities.

It turns out that like most startups, it didn't work out.

So I found myself one day with that moment of, what am I going to do?

We all go through this in times in our life, and it's good to take a pause.

I fell in love with tech and I fell in love with the fact that this industry is always moving, it's always changing, always innovating, luckily fairly recession-proof.

I think it's really easy to kind of fall into an ethos of where you work or who you work for.

And then you wake up one day and you're like, oh my gosh, it's been 10 years.

How am I still here?

For me, I was always like, look ahead, pick your head up every once in a while, see what's going on.

And then when an opportunity opened up, put your fear aside and, you know, go for it.

I think as leaders, we go through a lot and

I'm super glad to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, wow.

So many things.

But I think a couple that sort of stand out is I think when you fail or when you lose or when you don't achieve your goals throughout growing up or early on in your career, your life, you can either use that as an opportunity to grow

or you can let it take you down a different path.

So I think that there was like lots of examples of skinning my knees and falling down and not achieving what I thought I wanted to achieve.

And, you know, it hurts.

So I did a speech in college at a speech class and I had to do an informational speech.