I’ve always considered myself an entrepreneur. When I was 13, I was a video gaming addict. My dad bought me and my sisters a Super Nintendo on a business trip. Shortly thereafter, my days after school, consisted of video gaming, playing basketball / roaming around the apartment complex and doing my homework (which I rarely did at home) . I was very good at most video games, but there were some games that were just very hard to beat. I found that I was really good at finding information on the internet. This meant that I was able to find obscure video games cheat-codes online.

Hence, I started a business to supply cheats of any video game that people needed. The business model was as follows: The user would submit a request using my website and I’d respond with the types of cheats I found, and they’d pay me for my services, at which point I’d release the codes to them. I wrote the website using a combination of notepad and Front page. I used a custom CGI-script to send myself the user submissions. I hosted it on virtualave.net. No one could have told me that I didn’t have one of the next great ideas. Our house helper at the time, Stella (RIP) encouraged me and said she liked the idea. However for many obvious reasons, the idea never quite panned out. I will say that I did get 3 requests for cheats.. although they never followed through with their payments.

That actually was really my first and only real business venture (until Digitalvaliance) in the sense of the world although I’ve been involved in many business transactions/deals since then. I have always made sure to pursue roles and responsibilities that would allow me to grow into a savvy business person. I made sure I was the president of several student groups and that I learned how to lead and deal with people, because I just knew that later in life, I was going to be running my own businesses and needed to have those qualities.
Digitalvaliance is the first business I’ve founded with the help of friends and family. With our tag line of “Bold Creativity”, we aspire to provide creative web applications for our customers at creative prices. We will also be developing some of our own applications to be used by the masses. We have a lot of ideas for where we want to take the company, and so I am very excited to see where the company will go and how some of the ideas will pan out.

PS - If i could go back to being 13, I would have done my cheats-company very differently. I would have created an online community for users to submit their own codes and cheats for specific games, and generate revenue by selling or renting games online and by placing advertisements within the website.