MATT HALL

I was 18 when I started my first company. An online golf apparel store operating out of a spare room in my parents' house. I had no idea what I was doing, but I did manage to convince a few vendors to supply me, set up a business account with a shipping company, and actually managed to get some customers... That was the first website I designed. It wasn't very good but I enjoyed putting it together. I enjoyed the whole experience of starting a company and being in over my head and having to figure things out as I was going along... When I was still in college and was first starting out in tech, I was once again in over my head. As I was studying online communities and potential lessons governments could learn from how open source projects organize, I found an emerging field, called CivicTech where technologists worked on opening up government processes by bringing them online.