I am not the best in the world at any of this.

Since I was old enough to remember, I wanted to be a Marine Corps scout sniper. I grew up listening to my grandfather, Gustavo “Gus” Mendez, talk about his tour in Korea.

I never wanted to be anything else as a kid. No firefighter or policeman. I put on camo, crawled through the brush, and pretended I was stalking the enemy.

So when I turned 17, I wanted to follow him, but I needed my parents' permission to join the military early. The National Guard was the only thing they would say yes to, so I jumped on it foolishly. I often regretted that decision. Today, I am so thankful that it unfolded exactly as it did.

After high school graduation I went to basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, where I graduated as the honor graduate of my company. Then I went to Fort Sill to become a forward observer.

My job was to coordinate fires effectively and expeditiously while under overwhelming enemy fire. It wasn't the job I dreamt of but It fit me well.

I have always had a knack for breathing under pressure and taking the shot that matters. As a forward observer, I was trained to identify the enemy and coordinate people and resources quickly enough to overwhelm and kill them.

I still approach business problems with a lot of that same training. Understand the objective, identify what stands in the way, and coordinate the people and resources available to accomplish it.

The National Guard recruiter had promised my parents I would be able to go to college and would not deploy. Pretty much as soon as I got home from basic, I found out we were deploying to Afghanistan.

I got to witness good leadership there. I also saw fucking horrible leadership, and the latter taught me far more.

I also saw how easily people who have never met each other can be taught to see one another as less than human. The Afghanistan I experienced did not fit neatly into the stories I had been told about the people living there or why we were fighting them. That changed the way I looked at authority and accepted narratives. I learned to see things for myself and make up my own mind.

Tactical Combat Casualty Care (TCCC) and the Ranger First Responder training I received while in Afghanistan made medicine interesting to me, so I started school as a pre-med major. As I learned more about the medical industry, I decided I did not want to spend my life prescribing medicine and changed direction.

I switched to Finance and I also took my first web development class and learned the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Outside of school, I built @JustinFitnessInc to 25,000 followers. Bang Energy and a few other companies sponsored me, and I launched a clothing line called Capital Gainz.

Then I got an opportunity to move back to California and work for a syndicate of high-net-worth investors evaluating manufacturing facilities for acquisition in the Bay Area.

I was the dumbest person in the room.

I was suddenly working under investment bankers, global pharmaceutical executives, wealth managers, and tax advisers. True specialists who had spent decades learning things I barely understood… yet.

I loved it.

I have never had a problem being the dumbest person in the room. I dive in, learn as fast as I can, and start applying what I learn immediately.

I spent a few years working through deals with that group before I was given the opportunity to take over management of a small company. The owners had built the company to around $70,000 a month in revenue, but the business had outgrown their ability to operate it.

I installed the first layer of management, cleaned up the vendor debt, and worked through the back taxes directly with the IRS, Franchise Tax Board, and EDD.

The owners were able to step away completely and, for the first time in years, receive a distribution. While I was running the company, I would still take days working as a frontline employee because I wanted to know what the customer experience actually looked like.

One of those days changed what I did next.

At GreyDot, I got to work across the digital infrastructure businesses use to grow. I built websites, worked on SEO, ran paid advertising, built automations, worked on analytics, and kept getting pulled further into the systems connecting marketing, sales, ops, and tech.

When something did not work, I wanted to know why. Sometimes the ad was the problem. Sometimes the website was the problem. Sometimes marketing was doing its job and the business was losing the opportunity somewhere else entirely. I kept following the problem.

During the day I was doing that work with real businesses. At night and on weekends, I was teaching myself to code. I had taken that first web development class years earlier, but now I wanted to be able to build complete software myself.

Eventually I could build full stack apps from scratch, and the timing could not have been better.

By the time I was building full applications by hand and had the confidence to ship products for money, GPT-3 was coming out.

I started using it and kept going deeper, applying it to development, copywriting, and early ReAct agent architecture. By the time GPT-3.5 Turbo came out, I was teaching AI at a local startup meetup group in Folsom CA. I taught why language models fail at math and need tools. I gave presentations on ReAct agents and GANs.

I knew where this was going.

So I started putting AI to work inside real businesses, where the outputs actually mattered.

I learned where it could add zeros to the top and bottom line, and more importantly, where it should never go. I broke things. I made mistakes. I had huge wins. As always, the lows taught me far more than the highs.