How I actually got here

I have gone back over that night more than once, and this is what I think happened.

I did not stay because I found a reason to live. I stayed because something outside of me needed me, and that turns out to be a completely different mechanism and a much stronger one.

Cole was the first thing in my life that was bigger than me. After him it was my first company. After that it was getting veterans to a place where they could bet on themselves.

Everything I have built since has run in that order. Somebody in front of me needs something. I go and help. What I find underneath is a system that made their problem and is still running, and then I have got ten years of work.

I decided to go to school because the trailer and the sugar beet plant were not taking me anywhere I wanted to end up.

I sat down with the veteran advisor and he asked what I wanted to study. I said nursing. I wanted to help people, and it was the only thing I had ever pictured myself doing.

He said that was great, and then he said the nursing program was competitive, and not everybody who applied got in.

That is all he said. He was not being cruel and he was not wrong. It was accurate information from a man doing his job.

And what I heard was: not you.

I said, oh. No, I do not think I could do that. I should probably do something easier. I walked out of that room enrolled in criminology and juvenile justice, and I signed up for the absolute minimum course load that still counted as full time, because I was frightened of taking on more than I could carry.

Halfway through that first semester I added another class. I finished on the president’s list.

The next semester, straight A’s again.

Only then did I let myself think it. I am actually good at this. I nearly failed out of high school and here I am with a brain that works and the discipline to use it.

So I switched to nursing.

Three semesters of proving it to myself before I would attempt the thing I walked in wanting on day one. That is how little I thought of myself.

I moved to Austin and took a job as a mortgage loan originator. They sold me a Wolf of Wall Street pitch. Sharp kid, you will make a million dollars.

What the business actually did was sell predatory refinances to people who could not read them, and then foreclose on the homes.

I never closed a single deal there. I lasted about three months, and on my way out I sent a company-wide email telling every one of them exactly what they were. That did not go over well.

Austin was booming, and if you could write a line of code you could make eighty grand, so I spent a year teaching myself. Then a coding camp. Out of fifty people in that class, two of us got jobs immediately. Me and one other veteran.

At that first engineering job the company got hit with an accessibility lawsuit. Thirteen thousand employees, and I was nobody in it, four months off the street with a certificate.

It was a predatory suit and nobody had actually been harmed, but I sat up that night asking how I keep this company that gave me a shot from getting screwed.

My mother had married a man who happened to be blind. His name was Ken.

I was on a treadmill when it landed. I stopped the machine and called him. If I got you paid to sit next to me and tell me where this is broken, and then tell me whether my fixes actually work on a screen reader, would you do it?

He said yes.

The next morning I messaged the CEO and the CTO. Two hours later I was pitching them, and I have rarely been that frightened. They flew me to Nebraska the next day. In seven working days Ken and I mitigated the suit and saved the company millions. He got paid, I got paid, I got promoted.

Then came the part that changed my life.

I was elated. We had done a thing. Ken was flat.

I asked him what was wrong. He said: Luke, for the first time in my life I felt intellectually valued. And it sucks, because it is never going to happen again.

I said, what do you mean? You are blind, not dumb.

So he explained it to me. Every job in this country runs on two or three pieces of software. A point of sale, a CRM, a support system, email. If you cannot use the software, there is no job. And almost none of it is built to work without eyes, because so much of software is visual cueing that nobody notices doing. The size of the button. The color of the button. A screen reader on its own does not get you there.

Then he told me where he had worked before.

There is a carve-out in federal law that lets certain nonprofits pay disabled workers less than minimum wage. The reasoning offered is that a full wage would cost them their benefits, so the low pay gets framed as protection.

Those nonprofits run warehouses. Ken spent twenty years in one of them making toilet paper for the United States military and the federal prison system. He was good at it. He worked his way up to line manager.

The promotion did not come with more money, because it could not. He was still under the carve-out. He got the responsibility and they got the output, and his pay stayed where it started.

I have always been the one who goes after the bully. I was a big kid, and in whatever room I have been in I have stood up to it even when standing up meant getting hit.

This was a bully, and nobody had designed it that way on purpose, which somehow made it worse.

So I said no.

The company laid everybody off a few months later, and I took that as my answer.

I spent the next year building Clusiv, the first e-learning platform made for people who are blind or visually impaired, with a team that was seventy percent visually impaired. This was before you could build a company with low code and AI. Every piece of it was a real engineering job and I was nowhere near good enough to do all of them.

Which meant I needed money. To get the first check I pitched a hundred and eighty-five investors.

People think a rejection is your idea is not for us. Sometimes. Other times it is your idea is dumb and you are dumb and why did you waste our time. Or they are too scared to give you real feedback, so they say you are too early, and you walk out having learned nothing and do it again the next day.

I lived on ramen and worked side jobs to stay afloat while going full time on something that did not exist yet.

How do you build the nerve to keep pitching when it is not your world? Reps. You have to be willing to look like an idiot in public. Anybody who says they walked in knowing how is lying.

Then one said yes.

A week later the managing director of Techstars called me and said, you are my first call, you are in. Twelve thousand companies apply for ten places.

The entire physics of the thing changed overnight. I remember raising thirty-five thousand dollars from seven people by text message while sitting on a toilet. I had set out to raise five hundred thousand. We closed the round near a million.

Nothing about the company changed that week. The sentiment changed.

I had built it to sell into government agencies, because blind users do not have a lot of discretionary income for software but vocational rehabilitation agencies do.

Then the funding line those agencies depended on was cut. Every contract we had was cancelled.

I laid off my entire company two weeks before Christmas, in December of 2023.

Which leaves you with a question you cannot put down. Am I a one-hit wonder, and was even that a hit?

I took a job with the government after that, assessing AI companies and the people running them for whether they fit federal needs. Flying in and out of Washington. It was genuinely interesting work and there was a little power to it when you walked into a room.

It did not scratch anything.

In February of 2024 I sat down and wrote one line on a note card. Within seven months I will be earning thirty thousand dollars a month.

I still have the card. Within seven months I was.

What made it VetClaims was a lunch. One of the men I worked alongside has three Purple Hearts and has been shot five times, and somewhere in that conversation it came out that the VA had him rated at thirty percent disabled.

Thirty percent. My toenails should be rated thirty percent.

So I went looking for somebody who could help him fix it, the way you would look for a good mechanic. What I found was that in the ten years since my own discharge, nothing had changed. The same maze I could not navigate at twenty was still sitting there with a friend of mine stuck in it.

Here is what a veteran is actually up against. You have to prove not only that you are injured but that the injury connects to your service, and the proof the VA accepts is specific in ways nobody explains. Over seventy percent of first claims come back denied or rated too low. Most men take that as the answer.

Getting it right is worth twenty to fifty thousand dollars a year to that man, tax free, for the rest of his life. That is not a nice outcome. That is a different life.

Nobody had built a real fix, and there is a reason. Federal rule stops accredited agents and attorneys from charging a fee to prepare a first claim. The intent was to keep predators away from people who had just come home. The effect is that the people best equipped to help have no way to be paid for it, so they do not, and the veteran is alone with the paperwork.

We built it anyway, inside the rules, at a flat fee, taking nothing from anybody’s backpay.

Zero to four hundred and thirty-eight people in twenty-two months. Most of them veterans. Eight thousand more come through every month.

Somewhere in there my own employees started calling me CEO Daddy. I did not pick it and I cannot shake it.

I do not have to work sixteen and eighteen hour days anymore. I have the people and I could hire more. I do it anyway.

Part of that is that I love it. The other part is closer to martyrdom. It is not my life that matters, it is the thing I am fighting for, and I will take that as far as it goes.

That comes with a bill. It makes you a hard person to love. It takes something out of you that does not come back on a weekend. It probably costs me years on the other end.

It also builds a level of resilience that is frightening to anybody planning to be an obstacle, because they have never come up against somebody willing to take it all the way.

On survivor’s guilt, plainly: there are things you do not get to unsee, and no amount of therapy or medication takes them back out of you. What you can do is attach them to a mission and turn something unfixable into a disgusting amount of work. It does not cure anything. It gives it somewhere to go, and it means what you carried out of there was not carried for nothing.

Most people coming out of any transition, not just service, are trying to fill a hole. They chase the camaraderie they lost or they find something to drink so they stop noticing it is gone. What they are short of is a mission.

When my grandfather died, the church could not hold the people who came. They ran three separate services to get everybody through, and the National Guard had to send a second honor guard team because the first could not keep up.

By every account I have heard, he was a difficult man when he was young.

These days I keep a ranch outside San Antonio.

Five longhorns I pulled from auction, one of them twenty-one years old and on her last pasture. I told the owner to cut me a deal and I would guarantee they lived out their lives here and he could visit whenever he wanted. There is a mini highland cow named Ruby who is a seven hundred pound puppy. A donkey. And Whiskey, still stealing food off the counters.

I know nothing about cows. Not one thing. But I have grass and water and we will figure out the rest, which is more or less how I have approached everything since that trailer.

When I have run myself into the ground, which is often, the thing that brings me back is out there. I go and sit with the animals.

The point was never to grind forever. The point was to build something that outlasts the reason I started.