Ade Olonoh

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. Moved back to the US in the 6th grade.

I had my first coding experience on a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. I don’t really remember when it came into our family. My best guess is that my grandfather got it secondhand sometime in the mid-80s, and it gathered dust until one of the summers that I came to visit as a child.

I spent most of my time on that machine playing Parsec, a horizontally scrolling shooter. I remember spending hours excitedly banging on the ESDX keys to dodge enemy fighters. Then groaning in frustration at the unforgiving gameplay as I crashed into a stalactite. I would see visions of spaceships when I closed my eyes to sleep.

Other than Parsec, we didn’t have any great games for the TI-99/4A. So when I got bored, I’d turn to a book of code listings for programs you could run. I’d tediously transcribe hundreds of lines of TI BASIC from the book, careful to get the syntax right in a flurry of CALL and GOTO statements. My reward for that tedium was a few minutes of playing with a simple program.

The computer didn’t have a hard drive. So once I was done with a program and turned the power off, it was gone forever. If I wanted to go back to it the next day, I’d have to transcribe the code all over again.

I’m not sure how much of the code I actually understood. I don’t think I ever got to a point where I could sit down at a blank screen and write a program from scratch. But I picked up enough to tinker and make small changes to the graphics or logic. And that stuck with me long enough to give me a head start when I had my first real programming class many years later.

I’m sure I could still crush Parsec.

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. Wasn’t very good. 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.

Pirated a copy of FruityLoops and blew my savings on a pair of turntables and vinyl. Couldn’t get anybody to call me by my DJ name.

Started a software company called Bottled Software along with four friends from college. Racked up credit card debt. Learned a lot about entrepreneurship.

Met in college, married soon after we graduated. 25+ years later, still going strong.

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. Made enough money playing online poker that I felt comfortable quitting my job at the Star to start my own business. Took a 15 year hiatus.

Rediscovered tournament poker during the pandemic. Started competing at high stakes. Currently spend about three months out of the year grinding in Las Vegas.

Father to three boys. Played a lot of Minecraft, Fortnite, and Overwatch. I can still beat them at Mario Kart.

Quit my job the week before my eldest son was born. Started a consulting company called Recursive Function. Launched Formstack on the side as a SaaS tool for building online forms. Eventually shut down the consulting business to work on Formstack full-time and raised a small seed round from angel investors.

Grew to a couple hundred employees and tens of millions of dollars of recurring revenue before selling to a private equity firm.

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. It was one of the fastest growing social media platforms of its time, reaching over 50 million monthly users.

Growth ultimately stalled, and couldn’t sustain the business. Sold for pennies on the dollar to another social media company that eventually shut the site down.

Made angel investments in over a dozen tech startups. Joined Starting Line as a Venture Partner.

Started watching Drive to Survive during the pandemic with my wife, fell in love with F1. Got to meet Lewis Hamilton at a race in Las Vegas, I’m sure we’re best friends now.

Started The Worst Movie Podcast with my brother-in-law, where we talk about some of the worst movies ever made. Have grown to dozen of listeners.