© 2023
© 2023
My name is pronounced “ah-Day uh-La-no”.
Born in the US, and moved to Nigeria when I was two years old. Watched Superman repeatedly, but wanted to be Batman. Named our pet dogs Optimus Prime and She-Ra. Played countless hours of Parsec on a TI-99/4A. Moved back to the US in 6th grade. Ate a lot of cereal.
Fell in love with programming in a QBasic class. Played MadMaze obsessively on the library’s hacked Prodigy account. Fell in love with the Internet via a 14.4k bps modem and a SLIP/PPP account. Sold my first software app for $50 to the coach of the baseball team. Played rugby all four years. Drove a Ford LTD.
Double-majored in Computer Science and Mathematics at Anderson University. Paid my way through college by writing Perl code. Played a lot of Quake and Unreal Tournament. Discovered Kurt Vonnegut, Wes Anderson and Moby. Became a vegetarian. Met my future wife. Had a brief stint as a radio DJ.
Started a software company called Bottled Software along with four friends from college. Racked up credit card debt. Learned a lot about entrepreneurship. Got married.
Worked for Gannett at the Indianapolis Star. Wrote code, scaled high-traffic websites. Led the team that was in charge of the technology for the online, production and editorial systems. Learned a lot about management. Fell in love with poker at the start of the Moneymaker boom.
Quit my job the week before my eldest son was born. Started a consulting company called Recursive Function. Created Formstack. Played the WSOP Main Event for the first time. Had another son. Shut down the consulting business to work on Formstack full-time. Raised a small seed round from angel investors.
Created a social Q&A app called Formspring. Grew to 1M registered users in 45 days. Moved to the Bay Area. Raised over $16M from a stellar group of investors. Had another son. Grew Formspring to more than 30M users, but couldn’t sustain the business. Sold the company.
Played a lot of Minecraft with my kids. Lost 20 lbs. Learned Objective-C. Created Loop but didn’t get much traction so shut it down. Read a lot of post-apocalyptic sci-fi novels. Went back to Formstack full-time. Launched Jell. Moved back to Indianapolis.
Stepped down from my day-to-day role at Formstack. Sold Jell. Made angel investments in over a dozen tech startups. Joined Starting Line as a Venture Partner. Ranked platinum on Overwatch as a support main. Became vegan. Lost another 20 lbs. Started playing poker full-time.