Nathan Barry

And then when I was 17, I'd spent two years in college at this point, and I landed my first $10,000 web design project.

And I called up my mom and I said, look, I'm here to learn how to make money.

I'm pretty sure I'm making money now.

And so she was like, yeah, if you want to drop out, go for it.

And so I ended up dropping out and doing freelance web design for a couple more years.

Now in 2009, I said I'd been freelancing for almost two full years at that point.

I guess the end of 2008, I had my best month ever.

I landed a bunch of clients that was going really well.

And then I went away on a trip to South Africa with my girlfriend at the time, now wife, and a bunch of friends.

We worked at this orphanage in South Africa and did these amazing trips.

And I took five weeks off, which I felt really good about because my freelance business was going so well.

And when I came back, all the clients that I had lined up to work with, they all were like, we're not spending money because it was then the financial crisis had fully hit.

And so I went from feeling awesome about the freelance business to be like, this isn't going well at all.

And so the quick version of all of it is I ended up taking a job at the one client that was still spending money, which was a company called Unity Media Group.

and I ended up leading the design team for them.

They were like two people when I joined, and they raised a bunch of venture capital, like scaled up the team, and I spent three years there.

I learned really a ton, the basics of leading a team, all of that.

That was actually the last real job that I've had.

The only three jobs I've had in my life are working at Wendy's in high school.

I worked for the Boise State University bookstore very briefly.