About Us

As a kid growing up in Southern California, I (Josh) liked skateboarding more than school.

I did well enough in school, at first. Up until sixth grade, I was “the smart kid.” I didn’t even have to study to get perfect scores on everything.

Then, in 7th grade, we began to study algebra. I didn’t know how to do algebra, and I didn’t know how to study. I quickly fell behind and found reasons to ignore mathematics. “I’m going to become an artist,” I told my parents, “So I don’t need math.”

I soon fell behind in other classes as well. I went from feeling smart to feeling dumb, all within one year. Instead of taking responsibility, I rebelled against “the system” and refused to play “the game.” This, despite both my parents being educators.

However, I never stopped learning. I was a voracious reader. I mostly read science fiction and fantasy, but I also read Plato and books on politics and philosophy. I started businesses and learned about marketing, sales, and entrepreneurship. I built skateboard ramps and learned about woodworking, geometry, and construction. I filmed and edited videos of my friends skateboarding.

My senior year of high school, my sister gave me Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. I loved it and read it several times. It gave me a new perspective on school and my grades went from failing to straight As.

I enjoyed my first year of college, especially my art classes (I still planned to become a professional artist). I then took two years off of school to serve as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Brazil. I learned Portuguese, how to endure rejection, and how to lead individuals and groups. It was also during my mission that I learned one could study “business” at college.

After I returned from being a missionary I started college again in January of 1997. I switched my major from art to business.

I was on fire. I was a machine. I was disciplined, organized, focused, ambitious—nothing could stop me. I was in bed at 8 pm every night and up at 4 am. I worked out every day. I ate well. I studied like I had never studied in my life.

My first semester back in school I took 25 credits of classes. Remember how I hated math? Now that I was going to be a business major I knew I needed math, and I decided to go back to where my troubles started—7th grade algebra. Part of the reason I took so many credits my first semester back from my mission was that I was taking remedial math classes—5 years’ worth—in order to catch up to where I needed to be. I got all As except for one A-.

That summer, I traveled cross-country from Idaho to the East Coast for three weeks with a few professors from the business department and about fifteen students. We were enrolled in course and studied while traveling, but the real education happened when we stopped at businesses along the way and learned how they worked. We visited Motorola and talked to their giddy CFO, just after they launched the ill-fated Iridium satellite phone network (cost = $5B, later sold for $25M). We stopped at the Cabela’s HQ and I took the opportunity to interview for a job, totally spur of the moment (I didn’t get it). We visited dozens of other businesses until we reached Boston, where none other than Clayton Christensen, who was not yet the famous author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, gave us a tour of the Harvard Business School.

In January, 1998, I transferred to BYU-Provo, where I had my sights set on the Masters of Information Systems Management (MISM) program. The MISM billed itself as a tech-MBA. Half the classes were computer science/technology courses, and the other half were MBA classes. 1998 was the middle of the dot-com revolution, every company was investing in tech, and I knew I needed a strong tech background. I also knew the university couldn’t do it all for me—I needed real world experience.

From 1998 to 1999, I worked a few tech jobs. Then in December of 1999, while still a university student, I quite my job and started my own web design company.

I also began blogging back in the ’90s, before blogging was even a thing. Which eventually led to me becoming a contributor to Forbes. Over the years, I’ve written written or been featured in 300+ articles in Forbes, Fortune, TIME, Entrepreneur, Mashable, etc. I’ve been a keynote or panel speaker in Hong Kong, Dubai, Israel, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Singapore, and many places in the US. I’ve written books and helped other entrepreneurs write books. I’ve started and run several companies.

My wife an I became parents in 2008. We wanted better for them than a cookie cutter, conveyor belt education, so we chose to homeschool them. One child attended kindergarten in a Chinese school in Hong Kong, then homeschooled for 1st grade through part of 8th grade when she chose to start public school. Another child attended school in China before she joined our family, then tried homeschooling for a few months, then chose to attend public school in 8th grade. And our youngest, currently in 8th grade, has always homeschooled (other than a few months when he tried out a few classes at a public school).

…