Who?I’m a software engineer and entrepreneur focused on modern web technologies and AI.
Here's an ongoing autobiography, which also shares the story of my by-the-bootstraps "unschooling" education: now the subject of a chapter on grit and resilience in the bestselling book Mindshift by Barbara Oakley.
An angel investor once described my core soft skill in the role of founder or early team member as: "The ability to perceive exactly what needs to be done. And then to do it."
My experience working in difficult environments around the world means that I can be trusted to get things done, even when things go wrong.
In the past, I coined the term "Startup Cities" as co-founder of StartupCities.org and a startup spinoff, both of which focused on why startups should build cities. I now write about Startup Cities at StartupCities.com
I've won several awards for economic research and have been published or interviewed in Virgin Entrepreneur, a16z's Future.com, The Atlantic's CityLab, Foreign Policy, and in academic volumes by Routledge and Palgrave MacMillan.
Wait... what is this site?
This is my personal portfolio, inspired by the question: "What would the opposite of the two-color template developer blog look like?"
Have fun exploring!
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Contact:hello @ zach.dev
Overcoming Stage Fright With a Global Telecom Company
As a kid, I had crippling stage fright that wrecked my ability to speak or perform in front of an audience. When I played music as a teenager, my hands would shake on stage.
I've worked on this for years and, in 2015, pushed myself to audition for a role in a series of parody commercials for Claro, a big telecom corporation.
I was cast as "Chip Williams", an overly-earnest hipsterpreneur that sells wildly implausible cell phone apps for "You Wish App Company". My friends joked that I was born for this role...
The series has three parts and each commercial in the series only gets more ridiculous. The series debuted on national television in November 2015.
In 2016, Claro re-adapted and published the Chip Williams ad throughout Central America in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.
