It all began in sixth grade. Like most kids, I had a love for gaming, and I wanted to do more than just play other people’s games—I wanted to code my own game. The initial interest that aroused from my gaming experience led me to start a company by the end of my freshman year. Lacking experience, I decided to teach myself how to program instead of enrolling in a coding course. Although it was quite painful due to the constant trial and error and the never-ending visits to StackOverFlow, a website where coding questions are answered, eventually, I learned. 

Before settling on the vision to create my enterprise, my understanding of business was like a blank sheet of paper, similar to my coding experience. In March 2020, it was challenging to find a task to do with a considerable amount of free time on my hands. So, I turned to what I love the most: programming. Originally, the company was initiated as a foundation to help me gain more business experience because, in my personal opinion, life is much guided by past experiences. This idea guided me to create a web hosting company to support the small businesses that were struggling due to the pandemic by providing cheap and accessible web hosts that can help the online aspects of their business. Little did I know that in two years, the business would still be thriving.  

The job of a web hosting company is to publicize websites so that they are accessible on the internet server. In order to kick off my company, I rented a server for twenty dollars a month, and after the first month had passed, when I ran out of money, my friends started to chip in. Despite the fact that I spent two full weeks putting the whole website up, our site didn’t see the light until June 2020, which is when our site saw an increase of 1,500 visitors within a single week. Visually being able to see more people visiting the site showed me how much potential the company had, and it encouraged me to persevere through my struggles in the future. Soon after, wanting to take another step further, I started to code for my own caching and file system. These systems continuously make copies of the data, possibly slowing down the server speed; creating my unique system that is the best fit for my company boosted website speed significantly and provided better security respectively.     

It’s been two years since I started this journey, and now that we have returned to in-person learning, it has only become more difficult. Although I still spend more than twenty hours a week handling customer support and writing new code while balancing my other responsibilities, it’s a struggle trying to find ways to assist the customers while being at school for the majority of the day. Now, we have companies providing customer service support for us, giving me and my friends a chance to have a healthy balance between work, academics, and personal life.

Even though my business isn’t a full-scale company with thousands of employees, it is something I built from the ground up with my friends. Starting freshman year, I met several classmates with a deep understanding of computer programming and it spurred discussions that led to founding a tech company. They have stayed with me from the start, and the company has helped create a stronger bond between us. Up to this day, we spend our lunchtimes together chatting about school and our personal lives, aside from the company. Still acknowledging that this company has strengthened my business and coding skills, it is as equally as important to me that it has strengthened the bonds with the ones I love the most.