Howdy Steemit!

I figured that I should go ahead and post an intro something or another.

I am Michael Hiles, founder/CEO of 10XTS.

We're a blockchain dev lab in the Cincinnati/Dayton Ohio area. Been around for a bit. I'll post more about that later.

Personally, I'm just a regular startup-ish kind of guy - a little older than some of the cryptokids running amok, but don't let the salt-and-pepper grey in my beard fool ya'.

I started coding in the late 1970's on some giant-ass mainframes with a DiBOL compiler. I got lucky. My dad worked for a company called CINCOM Systems in Cincinnati. They're technically the first software company ever. They're recognized by the Smithsonian as the first company to ever sell software separate from the hardware. Kinda' legit place to get my start in computing.

So PC's became "a thing" and I was totally on it from the get-go. Timex Sinclair/1000, Tandy Trash 80s, Commodore, then my first PC.

After doing a few coding projects for dollars as a teenager, I figured out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. That led me into all sorts of fun stuff like owning a MIDI recording studio and working on the creative side while also taking deeper and deeper dives into data and process.

Since my dad was in sales, I was really fortunate to also listen to all the marketing and selling side of deep tech, especially as a kid in an era when it was new to everyone. Like... rocket science new to the business world.

That gave me sort of this dual personality, one side deep in the engineering bench. The other - the ability to explain it to non-technical people.

When the internet started to emerge in the early 90's I knew I could earn money just creating web stuff, so I launched a little company in Cincinnati called SoftLynx Interactive. That was around 1995. Then I merged it with a big direct print marketing company in 1999 and started creating analytics, inbound, all sorts of cool front-end dotcom 1.0 era noise.

In the early 2000's I shifted over to enterprise web, specifically working in the area of govtech. My team won a Smithsonian Award for being the first to connect a judicial system to the web.

Now I spend my time as the Director of Founder Institute Cincinnati, the local chapter of Founder Institute, the world's largest idea stage accelerator program. If you've ever taken a course on Udemy, well they're a Founder Institute company. We're in the business of launching new startups, running around with venture capital investors... all that fun stuff.

When I'm not doing that, I am consulting with some big companies as a digital strategy officer, and getting 10XTS off the ground. You can hit me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.

I'm a GenX married guy with a couple of awesome kids, so it's not just nerdville business all the time. Oh, and even though GenX, not really a huge fan of Seinfeld. That's its own blog post.

So anyway, howdy Steemit. Happy to be here!

Michael

P.S. Happy Friday!