5 ms·
Hacking while homeless?
Do you guys know of any successful startup founders or successful hackers or famous people in the tech world who are or were basically homeless?
I've been reading a lot of history books and the stories of various famous mathematicians, artists, and scientists can end up being a pure tragedy in some cases. I'm wondering about modern day stories on creating success out of tragedy. I'm also wondering about why these people succeeded while so many others did the normal thing ("Woe is me").
- rick888 15y agoI know there are some legendary stories about Richard Stallman living in his office. Does that count?
- dkersten 15y agoBesides what rick888 said about Richard Stallman, I don't know of anybody. I assume that finding somewhere to live is a more pressing concern for a homeless person than hacking would be. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but I guess none of them were successful enough for us to hear about.
- Turing_Machine 15y agoThere's a story about Hans Moravec living in the suspended ceiling at the Stanford AI lab when he was in grad school.
- stray 15y agoWhat do you consider successful? I've been homeless twice involuntarily and once voluntarily. How does one rise up from homelessness? Pure force of will and creativity.
- liquidm 15y agoCould you elaborate on this story? I'm very interested.
- stray 15y agoSure. A lot of it is covered in a book I'm writing (working title: The Minglewood Blues)... Things were tough all over in 2000, and the company I worked for held out longer than most. But it died too. And I found myself looking for work at a very bad time to be looking for work. For months I scored a fair amount of contract work - not a lot - but enough to get by. Around August of 2001 it didn't look like things were going to improve any time soon where I was so I developed a plan: we were going to head to the bay area because the bay area always bounces back from a recession faster than anywhere else. We sold off everything except my computer, my VW bus ("Minglewood") and the absolute necessities we needed to live out of Minglewood for a few weeks until I had a paycheck coming in. Two big things happened in September that year and one of those things is that I took a huge gamble and headed to california to look for work. By the time we got to San Francisco we were down to some small amount of money (I don't remember how much) and there weren't any computer jobs anyway. And as luck would have it, Minglewood broke down right after we got there. Oh yeah, and it turns out that San Francisco isn't even in Silicon Valley. Go figure. I ended up doing day labor when I could get it, begging when I couldn't -- constantly scamming for wifi to look for real work. The scary thing about being homeless is that it really sucks to be invisible and that (at least in SF) the way most people deal with the suckitude is with meth or heroin. And most of our friends on the street were junkies. Oh yeah, and heroin is dirt cheap. Dirt, dirt cheap. Cheap enough than $10 will buy you enough to stay high for a week, whiledeveloping a productive heroin addiction. Eventually I figured out how to escape San Francisco: I saved money to take the SF taxi driver course and got a gig driving a taxi - which btw was harder work than day labor and paid about the same. What I did was to save what money I could until I had enough to put Minglewood in storage and buy greyhound tickets back to Arizona. By this time we had moved out of Minglewood and were living in hotels around union square. On escape day, I checked out an ADA taxi (a van) so I could haul all our stuff from the hotel room out to Minglewood. I got everything moved, called for the tow truck and got Minglewood put in storage. I turned in the taxi, met my gf at the greyhound station and left for Phoenix where we at least had friends with homes. And without heroin. Total time in San Francisco: about 10 months. In Phoenix I went to truck driving school and got a gig driving an 18-wheeler. That only lasted 10 days though because I finally scored an interview for a sysadmin gig at ASU. I abandoned the truck in Kansas City and hitched to the greyhound station and had my girlfriend wire me a ticket back home. Another huge gamble and she was not pleased, but this time the gamble paid off with a sysadmin gig that allowed me to participate in NASA and ESA missions.
- guynamedloren 15y agoNot sure about homelessness particularly, but if your flip through some Forbes lists that contain short bios, many of the wealthiest people in the world had difficult upbringings, often revolving around a lost parent at an early age and/or rough childhood. If you go beyond the tech world and into hip-hop (quite entrepreneurial, in fact), then absolutely. Jay Z and P Diddy were raised in housing projects in New York and are now worth around $400 million apiece, I believe. If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what does.
- abbasmehdi 15y agoWhile I was in college there was this kid in grad school who was living in the lab. All the other grad students made fun of him. Our school's graduate program pretty much made education free. He moved on to become a prof in the electrical engineering department, which in my opinion is a huge success, especially given with he had to deal with.
- amorphid 15y agoI was pretty much homeless 18 months ago in San Francisco, and now my startup.is taking off. My email is in my profile if you want to chat.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]