Homeless to $115K salary: Tech worker who lived in SF shelter creates app for homeless, lands job

Preston Phan left his home in Seattle in late 2016 with $250 in his bank account and hopes of making it big in Silicon Valley. On the streets of San Francisco he became homeless for the first time in his life and struggled to get by each day. Less than a year later, he got a job making more than $100K for LinkedIn through help from a Tenderloin-based organization focused on putting homeless people to work at Silicon Valley tech firms. less Preston Phan left his home in Seattle in late 2016 with $250 in his bank account and hopes of making it big in Silicon Valley. On the streets of San Francisco he became homeless for the first time in his life ... more Photo: Courtesy Of Preston Phan Photo: Courtesy Of Preston Phan Image 1 of / 20 Caption Close Homeless to $115K salary: Tech worker who lived in SF shelter creates app for homeless, lands job 1 / 20 Back to Gallery

It was Christmas Day when Preston Phan, 29, stood on the streets of San Francisco's Mission District chatting with his family over FaceTime, careful not to allow the building where he was staying to slip into view.

Phan had left Seattle jobless and was now broke and living in a homeless shelter. Interest on his student debt was growing, and his hopes of making it were shrinking.

Three months later he would be living in the South Bay, earning a six-figure salary at a major tech company. This is the story of how he turned his life around in tech's heartland.

Struggles in Seattle

Phan, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, was born in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised by a single mother who moved him and his brother to Seattle when he was a toddler. He attended nearly a dozen public schools growing up and was forced into English as a second language classes even though he is a native speaker.

After taking auto shop in high school, he found a job with Boeing working on 777s. It seemed like a dream job at the time, he said, but what it really amounted to was low-wage, drone-like work with little chance of advancement.

RELATED VIDEO: Group seeks $100M to solve SF homeless problem

He was living with his mother in 2010 when he quit Boeing and decided to go back to school. He signed up for classes at ITT Tech but said he didn't learn much, so he dropped out and instead enrolled in biology classes at North Seattle Community College.

He soon landed a job in Los Angeles as an on-call surgical recovery technician at OneLegacy. His job: extracting the eyes of the newly deceased for donation, for $18.50 an hour. The irregular hours and exposure to tragedy put him into a deep depression.

Then he heard a story about a co-worker's cousin who found success after going to a tech boot camp. This inspired Phan to quit his job, move back to Seattle and get into tech. But there was a catch: The boot camp came with a $10,000 price tag. Phan didn't have the money and still had student loans to pay. But his older brother agreed to front him the money and give him a place to live.

Phan said he was finally feeling focused when he heard news that his best friend had committed suicide, and after finishing the boot camp, he languished in a deep depression for months. "That was a really tough time in my life," he said.

That was when his older brother leveled with him — he wanted his girlfriend to move in and to start a life with her and needed his younger brother to move out.

"And that's when I went into critical thinking and I was like, what should I pack, where should I go, what do I need, how am I going to survive, what are my short-term goals, what are my long-term goals?" Phan said.

Saddled with debt and deflated by a series of dead-end jobs, Phan had to do something fast.

Homeless in San Francisco

Phan left Seattle, and with $250 remaining in his bank account, flew to San Francisco for an employment program he had researched called Code Tenderloin, which promised connections and interviews with tech companies like Twitter, LinkedIn and Github.

But Phan had no place to sleep or store his belongings. He had no family in the city, no friends.

"My first three days I actually slept under a stairwell on upper Market Street," Phan said.

He stored his belongings in a 24 Hour Fitness locker, which was risky because the gym warned it would cut illegal locks and donate the items.

Next he needed a bed, so he started making calls, found a shelter and waited in line for three hours. They drew a lottery for beds and he lost, so he ended up sleeping in a chair the next three nights.

Rock bottom came on Christmas as he video-chatted with his family outside a homeless shelter. Pride ate at him, and he held back the truth.

"I didn't want to face the embarrassment of my family finding out I was homeless," Phan said.

Bootstrapping 1.0

Phan started the program at Code Tenderloin in mid-January. The classes, held from 5 to 8 p.m., focused primarily on skills like job interviewing and resumes.

Each day would start with being forced out of the homeless shelter at 5:30 a.m. He would then go to Peet's for a coffee and work on his computer for an hour. To earn pocket money, he found a job at Ross as a security monitor from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

"I was doing store protection, like protecting their assets, and the people I often got were homeless people that I would have to lie down and sleep next to, so that was kind of like an awkward thing," he said.

After eight hours at Ross and three hours of Code Tenderloin classes, Phan would often make deliveries for Postmates on his skateboard while waiting for a place to sleep at a shelter. Then at 5:30 a.m., he said, the lights would go on in the shelter and he would do it all again.

At the shelter, Phan noticed a problem: The process for finding a bed was complicated and involved making a reservation by phone or in person, something many found frustrating because calls often go unanswered. Then it hit him — most of the people waiting for beds had cheap cell phones that ran on Google's Android operating system, which he knew how to program.

"I started developing an application where you can make the bed reservation through your phone and walk to the nearest location," he said. "I think that was the start of my career, actually."

He started working on the app in the mornings and showed Code Tenderloin Director Del Seymour, who encouraged him to present it at a City Hall meeting on homelessness. The idea was not warmly received for various reasons — there's already a host of apps available for the homeless, including one designed by Zendesk called Link-SF — but Phan was undaunted.

The rejection stoked a fire and he began working harder on his app, stretching his own coding skills each morning before work. This continued through February until he graduated from Code Tenderloin.

From Ross to reversal

Code Tenderloin, started in 2015, is just one of several Bay Area organizations that train people with nontraditional backgrounds to work for tech companies. Its director, Seymour, came through for Phan with representatives from LinkedIn, who just happened to be scouting for such people.

The Sunnyvale company, now owned by Microsoft, had started a new candidate-vetting program in January called Reach. According to LinkedIn spokesman Stephen Lynch, it's an effort to remove bias from the hiring process by focusing less on theory in interviews and more on a candidate's finished projects. The program initially attracted 700 applicants, 29 of whom were hired and began working in April. Phan was one of them.

"We were hoping to find people like Preston without a traditional computer science background but who we felt could contribute," Lynch said. "Our assumption was there were a lot of good people out there who were being overlooked by the traditional tech hiring methodology."

LinkedIn offered him a job as an apprentice software engineer with a $115,000 salary and corporate housing near LinkedIn's Sunnyvale headquarters.

He said yes.

"I was actually on my lunch at Ross when they gave me the call," Phan said. "Then I ran outside the break room and said, 'I quit! I quit!' But not right away. I wanted to be nice, and I gave my two weeks."

Phan remembers the day in March when he moved out of the homeless shelter. "I felt great," he said. "I told them I was moving out to Sunnyvale, but I didn't want to give too many details."

To some, Phan's story may resemble a rags-to-riches tale akin to Will Smith's portrayal in "The Pursuit of Happyness," but Code Tenderloin's Seymour insists that it's not that kind of story.

"He does not fit that concept," Seymour said. "He was already super sharp — we just needed to remove some barriers."

Homelessness was a barrier Code Tenderloin was prepared to deal with, according to Neil Shah, a former financial analyst at Gap Inc. and Trulia who designed the boot camp. He said of the 10 people who graduated from the first program, five were living on the street.

"There's racial and socioeconomic discrimination in tech, and those factors combined don't make an equal opportunity for people coming out of the training program," Shah said. "The overall trend is moving in the right direction and moving the needle — it would just be nice to see it move faster."

Phan said he is now paying back the loan to his brother and moving ahead with his life, but he said there is a nagging feeling that keeps pulling him back to the project he started while at the homeless shelter.

"I do want to come back to the app," he said. "It would help people immensely. It would help them get back on their feet."