I’ve held this personally close for a long time, to the point where some of my closest friends still aren’t sure whether or not I’m lying or telling the truth. I’m not sure if this will set the record straight, but it will either do that or get me into some trouble. Let’s call it getting it off my chest.

After I graduated from UNLV I went to live in England, where I worked for a brief 6 months at a startup and bounced between design and development. My visa expired and I got kicked out. Not before meeting some of the greatest friends I’ll ever have. If the word family wasn’t such a cliche, I’d use the word here.

I was interviewing with anyone who wrote me back after reading my resume and poorly-worded emails. I took the first offer I got. I had one friend in San Francisco, we had met in Techstars a year before. I showed up Sunday around 9pm, slept on the couch and started the next morning. I met some amazing people at this startup and still interact to this day, but the job wasn’t for me. I quit roughly 4 months after I started.

Tip: Do not give two weeks notice when your birthday is in one week. This makes for an awkward cupcake ceremony where you’re not sure whether to smile or to laugh.

Part of the reason I could quit was because I knew I could freelance, I did it before and I could do it again. Right?

I had moved off of the floor by this time into big boy rent, $1,800 with 2 roommates, and knew I couldn’t go a week without making some money, so I started freelancing immediately. The leaseholder at this time was between LA and SF, working at SpaceX, and I had taken over his room while he was mostly in LA. He asked me if I wanted to do some freelance work for him…

I left SpaceX because I want to be back in SF, and I like my freedom running my own thing. We’re going to build this product for SpaceX as a separate team.

A dramatization of what occurred, but the best I can remember.

A thing for SpaceX?! I jumped. Certainly a few designers other than myself have dreamt of sending people to Mars staring at an interface you designed. I named an hourly rate I felt was friend-level, but still high—he didn’t blink.

The project was designed to visualize and analyze large time-series data sets. The data was coming from sensors, I think the number was something like 10,000 sensors on a rocket. The idea was that if you could see the correlation of the sensors, you might be able to make a more informed hypothesis about a problem.