Greetings DeRidder,
My name is Jason “Fuzz” Leonard, I went to grade school in DeRidder. I launch Internet startups for a living and currently live in Portland, Oregon. We have a thriving tech community and significant amounts of money are being poured into businesses taking advantge of local software development resources. This is great for me. As a technical co-founder skilled on the hottest application platforms (Ruby on Rails, iPhone/iPad, etc) I am one of the hottest commodities in the world right now. I have already turned down over two million dollars of capital in 2012.
I started learning to program as soon as we moved away from DeRidder, when I was nine years old and we moved to Georgia, where the school had an Apple ][+ in the gifted classroom. I took the manual home (without permission) and came back the next day competent in Apple Basic. I was building/hacking on application software and selling subscriptions to my BBS by the time I was twelve, which is also when I got my first email account (in 1984). I wrote tax preparation software for my mother that year, as well, which made it onto the download areas of several BBSs.
I am fortunate and blessed to have a knack for technology and entrepreneuership and to have had the support of my family and community to develop it. And I believe in my heart that now that the United States is moving beyond the industrial age—manufacturing is all about Asia now, the supply chains are all over there now. It is not coming back anytime soon.
I see this as opportunity.
From within the US it can be difficult to see, but we still lead the world in technology. By a good stretch. DeRidder, Louisiana may seem small compared to London, England, but if folks in London want to participate in the personal biotech movement they have to mail their samples to a lab in a more advanced country to do the workup. Folks in DeRidder do not. The cost of living in one of the traditional technology areas like Silicon Valley is quite high. The cost of living in DeRidder is quite low.
The post-industrial trend right now is toward sustainability, being smaller, using less and doing more good. You may be familiar with LLCs—my company is an L3C, a Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, structured under new regulations for socially-focused businesses designed to be more flexible than a 501c3. With this trend in mind, does it make sense for folks to live in these mega tech hubs where you cannot buy a decent house for less than $1,000,000? We do all our work on the Internet, anyway! It is crazy!
Well, it is not entirely crazy. It IS good to have a supportive in-person technology community, even if you do not actually work with them. You can still meet up and bounce ideas off of each other over coffee or get together for user’s groups and other things geeks like to do. What I see happening is the forming of regional micro tech hubs. If real estate prices get too high in one place there will be a split and another hub will form and so on, using intelligent capitalism to lead us to equal prosperity.
How do we make one of these micro tech hubs? We build the most valuable resources of today’s economy right in DeRidder. And we provide an environment that encourages these resources to stay in DeRidder (or come back) instead of running off to Austin or Atlanta or wherever. I want to teach bright high school students to do what I do, using the very latest tools and methods. Both how to build application software and how to start companies and launch products. I can probably start getting them paid in the second year of the program and by the end of three or four years there’s no reason a bright, hardworking student (or former student) could not be making serious money contracting or building their own products or starting up companies with their classmates. I know a lot of people in the industry, I can make introductions, write recommendations, attract publicity. I will use my brand to sell the work of the students—all projects managed by me, all code approved by me, so clients are assured work meets my approval and don’t have to sweat having high school students build their projects. While enjoying low rates that New York City and Silicon Valley cannot touch since those developers have to spend $1,000,000 minimum just to buy a home.
“The one absolutely solid place to store your capital today — if you know how to do it – is in software developers’ wallets. If the world survives looming financial apocalypse dangers at all, this is the one investment that will weather the storms. It doesn’t matter whether you are an individual or a corporation, or what corner of the world you inhabit. You need to find a way to invest in software developers.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/12/05/the-rise-of-developeronomics/
Three years from now we will have a handful of graduates. Some will go off to college. Some will stay—college means little in this industry. To be a manager at Google requires a degree but that is the only high-tech position I can think of that does. Cutting-edge software development in 2012 is about working code and personal brand. Hiring companies and venture capitalists want to see open source code projects on Github, a clueful Twitter presence, successful products; they could care less if you have a masters degree or used to work for IBM. Some companies have even stopped taking resumes altogether.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203750404577173031991814896.html
How unfortunate to spend $200k on an Ivy League education and not even have a resume to put it on. Why not stay in DeRidder and make $200k in four years instead? And, no, this does not mean they will be half-educated and underliterate—success developing software and launching companies is dependent on one’s ability to read and write English at a high level and to speak intelligently on a wide variety of topics, often becoming fluent in entire new fields of study just to complete a project. I am currently working on an application that manages pilot and aircraft logs, for example, so I have had to learn all about the paperwork end of being a pilot and owning aircraft the past few weeks.
Products do not exist in a vacuum. They need companies to support them. In the new economy that will not always mean a company started here will stay here or even be here in the first place. But some will. And those will need office personnel. Customer support personnel. And so on. If they run their own servers or start cloud/service provider companies they will need to build/repurpose buildings for data centers. They will need 24/7 staff operating a network operations center, that will be yet another entry path into the DeRidder tech industry—not everyone has the talent to build software, but there are other good jobs to be had.
Parents in the area with gifted kids will hopefully gravitate to us. Companies looking to do tech in the area will naturally choose DeRidder as the place to set up shop, to be with the rest of the community. And so on. Ten years down the road we could be looking at daily commuter flights to Houston from the Beauregard Airport.
In addition to working with youth I would like to work to bring other opportunities to DeRidder. The EB5 visa program is very underutilized and I have been working with the regional center here in Portland to develop business plans for foreign investors. Each of these involve a foreign investor investing $500k-1m in a new business to create ten good-paying, full-time jobs for two years, maintaining a certain percentage ownership of the business while the local entrepreneur retains ownership of the rest. Right now DeRidder does not have the talent pool necessary to fill all those jobs at a tech company, even if I structured it so most of the jobs are customer service. But I can structure it to make the pay really attractive for key positions so we can import talent if necessary. With hard work, determination and a bit of luck there will be jobs waiting for our students when they graduate, perhaps internships for them while they are still in school.
I have a number of EB5 projects in mind for DeRidder, such as building out inexpensive POS (point of sale—computer cash registers and inventory) syste ms and installing them for free all over town as part of a pilot program to build out a web API for POS systems. That sounds complicated, but all it means is that the cash registers will be able to talk to the Internet and web pages will be able to get information from the cash registers, like what products are in stock, how much the products cost, and send information to the cash registers, such as credit card payment information. Once all these POS systems are in place around town we will be able to build multiple software products that make use of the technology.
We would probably start with a shopping application that lets you comparison shop all over town from one web page. Another application might be a delivery service, allowing shut-ins or folks who just don’t like to drive a way to shop for items around town, pay for them and have a delivery driver go around and gather everything up. Another application could watch the price on certain food items at Wal-Mart, Brookshire Brothers, etc and send you an email or text message letting you know when rib eye steaks (or whatever products you are watching) go on sale again. Any of those projects (and dozens more like them) could be EB5 funded, made by high school students or both. In this way we use the town of DeRidder as our test laboratory, developing and trying out and refining these products in our city before releasing them to the rest of the world. Investor funds paying to develop products to make money and that improving the quality of like for DeRidder. Everyone wins! Except the big-city folks living in tiny houses that cost a million bucks who can no longer afford them because we are eating their business. But they can come to DeRidder and work with us.
Once businesses are connected to the Internet and folks can pay for purchases via credit card, then every participating business is capable of ecommerce. Not only that, but since folks from surrounding areas can shop DeRidder online they may start coming to DeRidder to do business instead of Lake Charles. It is nice to just type “ham” into a web page and find every place in town that sells ham along with pricing details, even buy it, pay for it and just be able stop in and pick it up, no waiting in line.
I call this the DeRidder Singularity Project, aligning us with the futurism work of Ray Kurzweil and Singularity University, http://singularityu.org/
I have set up a blog at deridder.info and this letter will be the first post. Hopefully folks from around the world will take part in this adventure with us and be inspired to start their own micro tech hubs.
I arrive in town next week. I will be busy finishing up the aforementioend aviation product for three weeks and then trying to get folks at the Beauregard Airport to try it out for us the week of February 20th.
The following week I would like to get the DeRidder Singularity Project going full swing. You may be waiting for the part where I ask you for money. Nope! Part of the beauty of this new technology is that it can be built for very little investment—I typically spend nothing to develop a product besides $10 for the domain name. Only after there is demonstrated consumer interest in the product do you have to spend money on it, to scale up your capacity so you can support more users. Students will need computers to get started, and by the second year of the program I would like to get Apple laptops (the standard computer of high-tech startups) for the program, but that’s nothing we need to get started and if I cannot get them donated I can acquire used ones inexpensively. The machines currently used to teach web design will be fine for now.
Welcome to the future!
Sincerely,
Fuzz Leonard
