I caught the entrepreneurship bug at around 15 years old. From a young age I had been exposed to business and commerce. My father had and still has his own tax and accounting practice. He had been a member of Amazon since 1998, helping me buy and sell items through their online marketplace. Similarly, he introduced me to the concept of bidding on items through eBay and then even selling items of my own. Whether my father knew it or not, he was instilling the concepts of commerce and entrepreneurship in me and setting me up to launch myself into the world of business.
At 15, I was spending a lot of time on Xbox Live with my friends and none of us had any real means to make money. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 had come out around that time and the Xbox 360 had been on the market for about 4 years. By then, hackers had developed techniques for creating modified versions of matchmaking lobbies which meant that gamers in those lobbies could take advantage of features only reserved for the game developers. Things like leveling up at an increased rate or jumping to superhuman heights were now a matter of toggling the functionality. The game had been out for a while at this point but this breathed fresh life into it. My friends and I wanted to experience this for ourselves.
We “gained access to the tools” needed to enable the modified lobbies and tried out the various functionalities. It was fun. At some point, a gamer outside of our group offered $5 to access one of our modified lobbies. We didn’t think much of it but once the second outsider offered money, we recognized an opportunity.
I knew about PayPal from my experiences on eBay. I already had an account setup. All it took was a little advertising over Xbox Live and the requests for lobby access started coming in. The money earned didn’t make anyone rich but it was enough.
I’d had exposure to internet commerce before that, selling old items on eBay, but generating cash from Xbox Live was a new world for me. Something about it was different. I think it was the idea that a market had been created in an ecosystem that was not originally designed to sustain it. That triggered something in me. From that moment on, I recognized that value could be generated from something I could create and establish myself.