All In? A Memoir of the Climb, the Code, and the Age of AI

Chapter 1: The Plan That Fell Through

I was born three pounds, twelve ounces. It was 1976, and from what I was told, a baby that size had about a five percent chance of making it. My mother wasn't supposed to be able to have children at all. She was older, she was rail-thin, she'd been told for years it wouldn't happen. She found out she was pregnant with me on an Army Reserve weekend, of all places — getting a routine checkup, when someone looked at her chart and said, I don't know quite how to tell you this, but you're pregnant. She called me her miracle.

I used to wave that off when she said it. She said it a hundred times. The doctors at Egleston and Scottish Rite kept me alive, and I've never once forgotten that I started life on the wrong side of the odds and came out anyway. I think that's the reason I've always looked at being here as a bit of a privilege. Not a right. A privilege. When you begin your life as the long shot that made it, you carry a certain quiet gratitude around with you, even on the bad days. Maybe especially on the bad days.

This is a book about a career in technology — about going from taking hard drives apart on my bedroom floor to steering artificial-intelligence strategy for some of the largest companies on earth. But it would be dishonest to start with a résumé. Because the thing that actually shaped that career wasn't a certification or a title. It was a childhood, and a series of plans that fell apart at exactly the wrong moment, and what I learned about myself each time one did. So let me go all the way back.

Lilburn

I grew up in Lilburn, Georgia, out near the Stone Mountain area — an ordinary middle-class corner of Gwinnett County in the 1980s. If you grew up anywhere like it, you already know the texture of it. We biked everywhere. We played in the creeks. We played football in the yard and, when we weren't being smart about it, in the street — which produced a reliable supply of scrapes, sprains, and the occasional injury that would send a kid limping home at dusk. We'd be gone for hours, sometimes what felt like days, and our parents genuinely did not know exactly where we were. And that was fine. That was normal.

No social media. No internet. No cell phones. If you can't picture it, I understand — it's almost hard for me to picture now, and I lived it. We had VHS tapes. Later we had Blockbuster, with that felt-tip due date on the sleeve and the low-grade dread of a late fee if you forgot to rewind and return. We had bulletin board systems — BBSs — where, if you were patient and your modem cooperated, you could dial in over the phone line, download a game one agonizing minute at a time, and leave messages for people you'd never meet. That was the internet, before the internet. And I loved it.

I went to Mountain Park Elementary first — a quiet little school off Pounds Road that had been there since the sixties, back when the roads around it were still dirt. Then Trickum Middle, over on Killian Hill. Good schools, familiar faces, the whole known universe of a kid who hadn't yet had a reason to question that the universe would stay put.

The funny thing — and it's the first of many things in my life that turned out backwards from how it looked — is that my mother did not want me to go into technology. My father was a computer engineer. He'd bring his work home constantly. I'm talking about the big flat-platter hard drives, the ones close to twenty inches across, 50K, 80K, heavy as a phone book and about as glamorous. He'd hold one up and tell me, with total confidence, This is enough space to hold every program ever written. You will never need more space than this.

I think about that line all the time now. I've spent a career around data lakes and data swamps and large language models that consume more storage in an afternoon than my father could have imagined in a lifetime — and we still barely use a fraction of what we hoard. Every time someone tells me a limit is permanent, I hear my dad and that twenty-inch platter. Limits move. They always move.

He'd leave those machines lying around and I'd get into them. I took them apart. Sometimes I got them back together and sometimes I very much did not. When I was finally old enough to have a computer of my own, I didn't buy one off a shelf — I ordered the parts one at a time and built it myself. Before that, he brought home one of those early "portable" machines, the kind where the keyboard latched onto the front of the monitor and the whole thing weighed a ton. It was not a laptop. It was a desktop with a keyboard stuck to its face, and it was gloriously expensive and gloriously heavy, and I loved that too.

That machine is where I learned DOS. It's where I first met the idea that a computer was something you configured, not just something you used. You'd edit the config files by hand — deciding how much of the machine's resources to give to sound, to your input devices, to whatever you were trying to run. I got so into it that I wrote myself a little program to swap configurations depending on what I wanted to do — game here, work there. I didn't have a word for it then, but that was the first time I bent a system to my will instead of the other way around.

I wish, looking back, that I'd been more all in on computers right then. But I was in middle school, and I wasn't sure yet. I was curious — deeply, restlessly curious — but curiosity and commitment aren't the same thing. That's a distinction this whole book is going to keep circling back to. Curiosity is where it starts. All in is where it goes.

The Bottom Falling Out

Somewhere in the middle of middle school, my mother got sick. Both my parents worked, which in our house meant a very particular kind of childhood. I was a latchkey kid — I had my own key, I got off the bus to an empty house, made myself a snack, watched some shows, did my homework, and waited for the adults to come home. When they did, the house divided itself along lines that felt ancient even to a kid. My mother went to the kitchen. My father sat down with the news. Both of them had worked all day, and still, that's how the evening sorted itself.

It struck me as strange even then, because my mother was one of the most independent people I've ever known. Before she was anyone's mom she'd been a bartender, a yoga and fitness instructor, an Army Reserve nurse who loved the work. There were two of her, it seemed — the fiercely independent woman and the kitchen-and-household mother — and watching them sit in the same person taught me something about how much bigger people are than the roles we file them under. To this day I love to cook. Ask my wife. I like to help. Some of that, I think, is a quiet argument I've been having with that old dividing line my whole life.

Then came the word cancer. It was a tumor on her kidney. They removed it, and afterward we sat with the doctor and faced the kind of decision no family should have to make at a kitchen-table pace. The margins were good, he said. He'd gotten it all. He did not push us toward chemotherapy and radiation. My mother didn't want them. I did. I was a kid, and I wanted every possible weapon aimed at the thing trying to take her, and I said so. But it was her body and her choice, and she chose no.

Six months later it came back, in her bones. After that it was years — years of hospitals, years of pain, years of a house reorganizing itself around a slow emergency. And in the middle of it, in the middle of my eighth-grade year, we had to move.

The medical bills did what medical bills do. My parents sold nearly everything. My father — who by then had suffered a stroke not long after my mother first got sick — sold the things he loved for pennies on the dollar. His tools. Even his bowling ball from his first marriage, which, if he were still here, he'd tell you was one of the only two things he walked out of that marriage with: the shirt on his back and that bowling ball. I came home from our old house on Habersham Ridge to watch a life get liquidated in a driveway, and I did not understand it. I couldn't reconcile it. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen, and the ground was simply gone.

A church found us a place to stay. We paid rent; I want to be clear about that, because my parents were proud people. But we needed the help, and we took it, and I've never forgotten what it means when a community catches you before you hit the floor.

The move meant leaving Trickum in the middle of eighth grade and starting over at a new school in the Shiloh area, in Snellville. We didn't move far — a handful of miles on a map. But when you're that age, a handful of miles is another planet. I left behind every friend I had, every face I knew, the entire known universe I mentioned earlier. It doesn't stay put. Nobody warns you about that.

Here's what I did with it, and I'm not sure it was healthy, but it was mine: around thirteen or fourteen, I threw myself into work. My first job was Burger King. And I want to say something I mean with my whole chest: everyone should work a job like that at least once. Something manual, something hard, something that leaves you sore. Fast food is one of the most demanding businesses there is, and the people in it deserve a respect they rarely get. The customers aren't always kind. You cook, you clean, you haul, you sweat, and it is hot back there. Let me tell you, a case of frozen hamburger patties is heavy — one of my coworkers got hurt over exactly that, and I pushed until the store got back braces for everyone.

We may hand a lot of those jobs to robots before long. That won't make the work any less honorable, and it won't erase what it teaches you: humility, speed, teamwork, and a permanent respect for anyone who's ever rolled up their sleeves for a living.

From Burger King I went to KFC, and from KFC to Walmart — and I will never forget the pure relief of coming home from a shift not smelling like burgers or fried chicken. Retail felt like a promotion straight into heaven. But Walmart turned out to be more than a break from the fryer. It was, in hindsight, my first real leadership education. I got to know every department. I got forklift certified. I could run a register, and I got called all over that store to do a little of everything. Eventually I had keys. I had something close to management responsibility while I was still a teenager, and I learned what it feels like to be trusted with a whole operation and not just a task.

Walmart also did something for me that I've never stopped being grateful for. I earned the company's Competitive Edge scholarship — twenty thousand dollars toward college. For a kid whose family had just sold everything in a driveway, that was not a line item. That was a door.

The Uniform

There's a military thread running through my family. My mother's father was in the Army. My father's father was in the Army. My father served in the Air Force; my mother was an Army Reserve nurse. So when I got to high school and a friend named Eric Adams pulled me into the Air Force Junior ROTC program, something clicked into place that I hadn't known was loose.

I loved it. I did not love wearing a blue uniform through the halls of a public high school — I'll be honest, that is not the easiest thing to do as a teenager, and it teaches you fast how it feels to have people look at you differently and think about you differently. But that turned out to be part of the gift. You learn to keep walking toward what you're after even when you can feel the room deciding things about you. You learn to help the people next to you. JROTC was a tight-knit group, and it gave me a place to belong right when my home life was coming apart.

I didn't stop there. I joined the Naval Sea Cadets — and no, I did not enjoy getting up at four or five in the morning to be somewhere by six. But because of it I stood on a submarine. I flew in C-130s and Huey helicopters. I did things a kid from Lilburn had no business getting to do. I joined Civil Air Patrol and went on search-and-rescue exercises, hiked the mountains, studied for exams, went to boot camp. Discipline. Service. Leadership. The words sound like a recruiting poster until you've actually lived inside them, and then they mean something you can't un-know.

And then there was Aviation Challenge. If you don't know it, it was the fighter-pilot cousin of Space Camp, run out of the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama — flight simulators, survival training, learning to think and act like a pilot. I went, and I gave it everything I had, and I came home with the Top Gun and Leadership award. They gave the top performers the flight scarves — the real ones, the kind the standout pilots wore. I still remember what it felt like to earn them. Not to be handed them. To earn them.

Because here's what all of it was quietly building toward: I was going to West Point. That was the plan. And it wasn't a fantasy. Congressman John Linder nominated me to the academies. I had the grades. I had the test scores. I had the extracurriculars stacked to the ceiling and the recommendations to match and a family tree that pointed straight at a uniform. Everything I'd done — the JROTC, the Sea Cadets, the Civil Air Patrol, the scarves — was a runway, and at the end of it was the life I'd decided I wanted.

And I couldn't go. I have a high-frequency hearing issue. That was it. That was all it took. It disqualified me from the academies and from military service, full stop, and there was no essay or recommendation or amount of wanting it that could change an audiogram.

It was devastating. I'm not going to dress it up. I took it personally — which I know now doesn't make any sense; a hearing threshold has no opinion about you — but I was a kid whose entire identity had been pointed in one direction, and the direction just closed. I was angry. Funny enough, I was thinking about this just the other day: I could have gone into the Guard, or the Reserve. In hindsight I probably should have. But I was too hurt to see the doors that were still open. When one plan dies loudly enough, it can drown out every quieter option standing right beside it.

That's the first hard lesson of this chapter, and I'll say it plainly: a closed door is loud, and the open ones are quiet. You have to make yourself listen for them anyway.

January 1

I was still angry, and my mother was still dying. By my senior year, home was a place I mostly went to sleep. My mother was in and out of the hospital, in constant pain, and — this is one of the hardest things to write — often too sick and too worn down to want much to do with any of us. My father was on disability after his stroke. I lived in the basement of the house we were renting over in the Snellville area, and I dealt with all of it the only way I knew how: I disappeared into school and work. I went to class. I went to my shift. I studied somewhere in there. I kept running, because as long as I was running I didn't have to sit down and feel the whole weight of it.

My birthday is December 23rd. My mother wanted to make it to New Year's. She said January 1st. It was January 1st.

I had been in the hospital with her for days. The doctor came in that morning and told us she was going to pass. I held her hand. I said goodbye. That is a thing no one should have to do, and I don't have a clever way to write about it, so I won't try. I'll just tell you that the Shiloh counselors came to the hospital and sat with me and got me through it, and my father was there, and I have never stopped being grateful to those people for showing up in the worst hour of my life.

The only two things my mother said she wanted to see were me graduate from high school, and — years later, though of course she never got to — my first daughter. When I did walk across that stage, it meant everything and it meant almost nothing at the same time, because the one person who'd asked for it wasn't in the seats. She was the most amazing person I've known. She loved everyone and everything, even when the world treated her like garbage. She just loved the world back anyway.

I'll say one more honest thing here, and then I'll move us forward. We were not a religious family growing up. When my mother got sick, she found God, and it was good for her — it gave her something to hold in a season when everything else was being taken. When she died, I lost God. It took me a very long time to work that out, and I'm not going to sit here and tell you where I landed, because I believe with everything in me that faith is a personal decision and every single person has the right to make their own and be honored in it. It comes and it goes. It's there if you need it. It's difficult. It's messy. You work through it yourself, and if you need help, you ask.

So there I was. My military dream was over. My mother was gone. And I was about to start college at a school I had literally never heard of.

The School I'd Never Heard Of

Here's how that happened, and it's worth telling because it's the whole point of the chapter. A science teacher — one of those people who see something in you before you see it in yourself — asked me one day, Matt, have you heard of a Georgia Tech satellite school called Southern Tech? Absolutely not, I said. Never heard of it. You should apply. Put together an essay. Just apply.

To this day I don't remember writing that essay. I assume I did. I have no memory of it. What I do remember is what came back: essentially a full ride. Because my family had lost everything, I qualified for a Pell Grant — and I'll say it here, I am genuinely thankful that this country invested in my education when my family couldn't. I picked up Rotary Club scholarships. I had the twenty thousand dollars from Walmart. It all stacked together into a full ride to Southern Tech — which became Southern Polytechnic halfway through my time there — taught by Georgia Tech professors who were every bit as hard as that sounds. There were mornings I sat in those classes thinking, what am I doing here?

I started out in textile engineering and materials science, of all things, because I still had NASA in my head and thought that was a way in. Then we took a field trip to a carpet plant up in North Georgia, and I watched fibers hang in the air while a worker coughed, in a place that felt neither safe nor alive — just three people and a lot of machines. And I thought, very clearly: this is not what I want to do. So I switched to computer science, and eventually earned my degree in Management Information Systems. Curiosity, again, doing what it does — refusing to let me settle into the wrong thing just because I'd already started walking down it.

College was, for all of it, a lot of fun. I joined Sigma Nu. I'll tell you straight that I didn't put enough into that fraternity — the brothers were fabulous, the relationships were real, and between building a career and raising kids and being married, I let a lot of those connections go. That's a regret, and it's one I'm actively working to repair, because I've learned the hard way that the people are the point.

I bought my first house. I was already running my own company by then, but that's the next chapter, so I'll leave it there. And I met a woman named Lindsay. We hit it off. We became real friends first, which is the best way it can happen, and then genuine partners — the kind of partnership that has now lasted twenty-four years and produced a family I love more than anything on this earth. She would go on to become Dr. Lindsay, a Doctor of Pharmacy, and my truest partner in every plan I've made since, including the ones that fell through. Especially those.

What the Broken Plans Were For

I want to end this first chapter with the thing I most want you to take from it, whether you're a kid trying to figure out where you fit, a young adult in the technology business — which, let's be honest, is every business now — or someone further down the road looking for a reason to keep going.

You cannot control what happens to you, or to the people you love. My mother's cancer didn't ask me. My father's stroke didn't ask me. A hearing test I couldn't study for erased a future I'd spent years earning. The world is messy. It is difficult. And it is beautiful — all at the same time, all in the same week, sometimes all in the same hour. You don't get to pick which of those shows up. You only get to pick what you do next.

And what you do next is this: you find the peace, you find the beauty, you find the love. You stay accepting. You put in the time. You put in the effort. You stay curious about everything, always, because curiosity is the one engine that never runs out of road. Sometimes you just have to keep running. And sometimes — when it counts, when you finally find the thing worth it — you have to be all in.

That's why this book is called All In. Because when you know you're all in on something, you eat it, you sleep it, you breathe it, you dream it, you want it. There's no daylight between you and the thing. I've felt that certainty exactly a handful of times in my life, and every one of them redirected everything that came after. The first time I truly felt it as a father — with my daughter Ava — I'll come to later, because it deserves its own space. But I felt the shape of it here first, in the wreckage of a plan that fell through: all in on moving forward. All in on technology. All in on curiosity, discovery, and experience.

West Point closing wasn't the end of my story. It was the door quietly opening onto the one I was actually meant to walk through — into a satellite school I'd never heard of, toward a degree I didn't start out chasing, beside a partner I hadn't met yet, and into a career I couldn't have drawn on a map if you'd handed me one. The plans that fall through don't ruin the direction of your life. Sometimes, if you keep running, they are the direction.

Dedication

For Dr. Lindsay — twenty-four years, and the best of every one of them. For Ava, Landon, and Isla, who taught me what the climb was really for — all the inspiration any parent could ever need. And for my mother and my father, who showed me that love is something you stay for.