Meet Brad

Howdy!

I'm a futurist, a coder, and a passionate student of psychology, philosophy, and physics, which leads to an interesting perspective of the world. I’ve been called overly ambitious, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I love photography and I am a constant traveler.

My minimalist viewpoint has allowed me to spend most of the past decade living with only a carry-on suitcase worth of clothes, working from coffee shops and furnished rentals. Someday I may put down roots, but until that happens, the world is my oyster, or so they say.

I grew up on a tiny Native American Reservation in the midst of the forests near Lake Superior. My childhood wasn't easy, but it feels good to look back on where I came from and see how far I've come.

This upbringing in the Northwoods of Wisconsin made me fall in love with nature.

When I’m not working on my businesses, I can be found outdoors hiking, biking, or paddle boarding. Although I have to admit, these past couple years has been much more working than hiking.

An avid listener of audiobooks, I love learning. And I’m much more comfortable teaching myself how to do something instead of sitting in a classroom. I guess they call my learning style, autodidactic. My comprehension skills are pretty solid, so accelerated learning tricks (e.g. 3x speed for audio/video) work well for me.

Creating and achieving new goals and habits is on my long list of things I love to do. Other things I love is golf, fishing, strategy games, science videos, and being positive & optimistic.

And of course, my top love for the rest of eternity is my life AND business partner, Rubie. She is gorgeous inside and out. We are inseparable and I will do anything for her. Imagining us old, cuddled in a double Adirondack chair on a porch in a forest cabin, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. I’m a lucky man!

An entrepreneur at heart, I started my first business - a website design and custom computers shop - when I was twelve years old. While other kids in my school were on the playground, I was building technology for businesses. It was a very eventful childhood.

When I wasn’t building websites or computers, I was assisting my Dad at his small town cable television company. Only 300 subscribers on our Reservation, but a ton of experience. From shoveling snow off 40 foot satellite dishes and repairing cut cable lines in town to tuning receivers and installing amplifiers in the head end, even printing, sending, and processing monthly subscription bills, I’ve done it all from an early age. And for that, I will forever be thankful to my parents and family for exposing me to so many unique and interesting life experiences growing up.

What I think is cool about my childhood is I personally watched analog signals (e.g. CBS, HBO, MTV) turn into digital. And paired with my knowledge of how the web and computer networks operated, my adolescence was a foreshadowing for my current company (and life passion) Sitecast. Wherein I hope to take human-technology interaction one step further and eliminate all of the bottlenecks from the process of sending and receiving something to interact with on a display. In other words, some day there will be countless ubiquitous displays throughout your life: the living room TV was once the dominant display. But now there are laptop computers, tablets, mobile devices, VR headsets, smart fridges, thermostats, in-car entertainment systems, the list goes on. Each of these devices are accomplishing the same task: bring information and entertainment to the audience via a display. I strongly believe the way these devices do this can be greatly simplified. And Sitecast will accomplish this simplification. But I digress.

By the time college rolled around. I felt I had a lifetime of experience wrapped up in an 18 year old body. Yet, I made the decision of going to business school, where I focused in Business, Psychology, and Economics. Unfortunately, it resulted in one of the biggest mistakes of my life by putting me into mountains of student loan debt. I had become an indentured servant to the corporate world.

Around the end of my first year as a corporate wage-slave, I had two options: stay in the rat-race and slowly pay back my loans, resulting in a mediocre life. Or quit my decent salaried, post-college job and struggle to pay my mortgage-sized student loan bill. The “smart” choice was to stay and pay. But being the rebel I am, I quit that job anyway. Safety and security is for the weak and timid.

I will never put a dent in the universe by following someone else’s passion, therefore I must make it on my own. And while bootstrapping a technology business is incredibly difficult, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Venturing back into the world of entrepreneurship, I resumed building websites for companies. This time with my company, Visible North. It was really interesting working with all sorts of companies because each one taught me the ins-and-outs of their industry.

As the years passed, I began hosting more and more workshops and talks on technology. And I fell in love with teaching. Paired with my passions of peak performance and goal-setting, I built Academy on the Go.

The Academy was an exciting period in my life. We had many happy students, a popular goal tracker, and super impactful courses.

While the Academy has been put on the back-burner, you can still access one of my favorite courses: Becoming Super Productive.

All of my past experiences have led me to become an expert in the web, user interfaces, APIs, and cloud networking. I am fascinated with interactive displays of all sizes and I look forward to the day when everything is simply a web browser. While native apps are all the rage these days, mark my words, the web will win. And Sitecast will be the new layer on top of it all.

Best of all, I get to build Sitecast with Rubie, while living wherever there's wifi :)

Notable Personal Projects / Hobbies

Designing a custom car - in high school I was obsessed with cars. Therefore I designed my own car. I took a completely stock vehicle, changed nearly every body part, added carbon fiber where I could, repainted it, improved the engine, installed a PlayStation and Xbox inside, and had an absolute blast driving back roads. I loved to take it to car shows and have people guess what model car it was. Selling it when I was in college was a sad day. But building it taught me to appreciate fine lines and that details within a design can make all the difference. I also learned there are better ways to spend my money!

@CouchSurfingCEO - for many years I slow traveled around the United States, lived with countless other people, and experienced how the locals lived all over the country. It was difficult to stay in any place longer than a few weeks. Too many things to see! I shared my travels and tips along the way under the persona, CouchSurfingCEO. After a while I killed the name because it was getting confused with the actual ceo of couchsurfing.org, which I had not foreseen when first creating. I just liked the alliteration. But more importantly, I was tired of writing about my experiences, I wanted to simply live them. I learned that living life through a 3 inch screen (my phone) is no way to travel. Nowadays when I travel, I only use my mobile device to capture a rare, scenic view. The travel stories can remain between me and my travel mate, Rubie.

Golf - at the age of 10 I had found 45 year old golf clubs at a flea market for 50 cents. Paired with the book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Golf (highly recommended), and a bunch of wiffle balls, I painstakingly combed through each page teaching myself how to swing a club, hit a golf ball, and all the nuances and rules which goes along with the game. At my peak skill, my lowest round was a 4 under: 68. When I was 18 or 19, I was fairly certain I would become a professional golfer. I still love golf, but I’m glad I didn’t pursue it as a profession. I’ll stick to the weekend warrior status.

Fishing - following my autodidactic ways, I consumed countless forums, magazines, and fishing shows about the techniques for landing fish. While my Dad and brother introduced me to fishing throughout my childhood, and taught me a ton, it was this research which led me to catch monster fish. Nowadays, when I can find the time, I still love to get out on the lake.