All names, places and references are fictional.
I had done well for myself. I truly counted myself as beyond fortunate. Hard work and talent by themselves will never yield as much as when luck is added, and I'd been lucky more times than not with one exception, I'd never found the right woman and settled down.
I had been a geek or nerd most of my life, being sort of introverted was either cause or effect, but still it is who I am. I loved problem solving and to some degree the creative, artistic side of coding. I was fortunate to meet some very driven and unique people along the way.
One person was Joy. She was an entrepreneur and her idea for a social media platform had taken off while we were still in college. Her idea was what might be considered a dating app, but all of us that worked on it knew it as a hookup app. At first, it was a one app fits all, meaning all were welcome, straight, gay, trans. Basically if you wanted to meet someone for sex, her app was the one.
She had sort of hired me to develop the code to bring her vision to life. Hired was an overstatement, she made me a partner in her endeavor with the promise of getting paid, eventually. Luckily I was driven by the challenge and felt that Joy and I shared a trust in each other. I think we were a great match in that anything and everything could be discussed without fear of crossing lines and that openness allowed for a free exchange of ideas.
During one of our meetings I had suggested specializing. Everyone immediately pushed back, but fortunately Joy asked for me to explain my thoughts. I explained that the code side of the app was easily ported into different apps where we could change the skin of the app to be more personalized for the person using it, but more importantly, it would allow us to sell more memberships. I even gave a quick demo for my idea and everyone seemed interested. I showed the same app, but tailored for each of a couple of different sexual preferences to include some fetishes. Joy on the other hand was beyond interested, and was immediately sold on the idea.
The reason I had suggested fetishes is because I had quite a bit of experience in that regard. I am a somewhat light skinned black man and lived up to some stereotypes, at least in my pants. One thing I realized early on, is that there was no shortage of middle aged, mostly white women that wanted a big black cock and within a few pictures, I was almost guaranteed to get laid. The vast majority of girls my age didn't really want anything to do with me once they'd seen my cock.
More often than not, it wasn't just a lady, but a couple that were generally married. Almost always there was some element of race play involved. I tried to keep an open mind and enjoy the time for what it was meant for and try to embrace what I felt was some role play. Occasionally, the race play went too far and I'd walk away. I'd wish them luck and suggest that they be transparent and let their potential partners know what they were looking for. That was especially true when the guy wanted to play as well. Maybe I was insecure when I was younger, but it's something I never got into. I prefer the female form in all of its unique wonder.
Joy gave me one month to fully articulate my ideas with code and give a fully functional demo for the team. That month changed my life in many ways. I learned a lot about user interface and user experience designs, but more importantly, I learned a lot about user data and its many permutations. I had done lots of research against our beta model that was being used at the college and found that we had users outside of the college. I broke the data up into age, sex, sexual preference, fetishes, successful hookups and so on. That data allowed me to prioritize what specializations I addressed first.
I had gotten permission to find someone skilled in User Interface and User Experience to help me add the skins per specialization. We had just used some free stock photos initially to nail the theme of each site. Once I shared it with the team, they were all sold. They started to get our own artwork for the pages which further made it our product and almost immediately, we saw sales go up.
After we graduated, I was working for a fairly well known Defense contractor in San Diego when I got the news. Joy had called a meeting of the original five stakeholders at Ponce's in the Kensington neighborhood. She ordered drinks for the table and had a cake brought out. The cake simply read, "We've been bought out!"
We were all really excited and Joy's overall vibe was bordering on almost manic as she was bursting at the seems to share the news. Per our original agreement that we signed and yes, even in college she was that meticulous, it laid out a percentage for each of us. I had agreed to thirty two percent. I knew that Joy had the highest percentage, but didn't know how much exactly. When everything was said and done, my share was a bit over a half million dollars before taxes. I'll don't even want to talk about what it was after taxes.
I was surprised to see how much of a formal process it was to turn over all intellectual property and document that process along with turning over all other aspects of our start up. It was intriguing to see how it played out. That was a valuable experience.
That was the first of probably fifteen or twenty startups I'd been part of until I decided I was done with the coding side of things. I had worked several more with Joy and even one with another of the original partners and each one of them yielded similar pay days for me. I had been fortunate beyond measure. I know several of my friends ended up in startups only to be barely compensated for their work.
I had lived a pretty modest lifestyle and frankly never really found a permanent girlfriend, so through some wise investments, I was pretty well off by the time I turned 50. Some might even say independently wealthy and that gave me the freedom to become a Venture Capitalist and invest in some startups. I'd say that I did well on about eighty to ninety percent of them. Again, luck had been in my favor.
One thing was for sure, you'd never guess that by looking at me if you saw me walking down the street. Aside from a few indulgences, with one being a 1967 Ferrari, that only came out on special occasions, you'd see me in a GMC truck, or my Camry.
I wanted a change of pace and my new passion was coffee. I'd pretty much mastered the making and drinking of really shitty, really strong coffee when I was in college but in my travels I'd found out what a decent cup of coffee tastes like. That was both a blessing and a curse, with the curse knowing what a good cup tastes like and rarely getting to have one.
I had traveled all around the world and had coffee in some very unique styles and locations and that gave me perspectives across multiple cultures. Along the way, I developed a taste for great tea as well. I always chuckled at liking tea, as it felt like my heritage was showing. I was a first generation Irish American. My mom was full Irish from Kinlough in County Leitrim and my dad was a light skinned black man from Birmingham... Alabama. Mom had been a Flight Attendant and met him at the Birmingham Airport where he had been opening a new restaurant.
Her family disowned her because of my dad's skin color. Dad was a successful, serial businessman. He always had a business idea waiting in the wings. He'd paid for me to attend San Diego State University for Computer Engineering all costs included. He didn't give me a lot of money for an allowance, but told me how I could find jobs and work for extra money. He was also very helpful in guiding me on managing my money once I'd actually earned some. He was my mentor and meant so much more to me.
Settling down.
I had been to Coachella to see some of the bands and the surrounding area was inundated with the big chain coffee stores and that left me disappointed. I was sitting on the patio of a restaurant in Indio and thought that this community really needed to know what a good cup of coffee or tea actually tasted like. Over the next eight or so months I devoted myself to figuring out the logistics side of getting coffee that had been roasted to my specifications as well as all of the other things like branding, marketing, web sites, unit costs and of course location, learning how to be less introverted... The list went on.
I reached out to a local realtor and asked about possible locations. I wanted to be reasonably close to the Empire Polo Club, but still near the main part of town since I knew that the various Festivals would bring lots of traffic, but I had to plan for getting a loyal local customer base during the rest of the year.
There were no suitable locations, but plenty of empty lots, so I went down the route of having one built. The money wasn't an issue, as it was all business related expenses and had tax benefits in the long run. Of course with being a new business owner, I also knew that I needed to live nearby.
I eventually found a really nice Spanish style house that had a casita on the property with a large shaded courtyard. I had the house and casita remodeled to have a bit more of the southwest charm without going overboard and had solar installed on both as well. My thought was that I'd like to be near zero total power consumption since air conditioning was pretty much almost a year round requirement in this part of the world.
I will say that the first year of the business I barely broke even and that was due to the Coachella and Stagecoach Music Festivals, with some traffic caused by the Riverside County Fair. Luckily, the Indio city council saw that I was getting a lot of traffic and started to incentivize development in my area. Because I had used their building code and signage guidance (not that there was much of a choice), they used my shop as the poster child if you will for all other development in that area to keep it themed and decorated in a similar way. Being an anchor business in the new area was a boom for me as everyone would come in bright and early for coffee.
I was fortunate again to find and hire some truly talented people, not the least of which was Jill. She was a talented lady with a taste for good coffee. Having her on the staff made me feel comfortable enough to leave the shop to her and actually take time off. She and I had met at a coffee shop in LA and had been a couple for a while, but stopped seeing each other. We remained friends, to the point she was working for me and I'd made her the store manager.
I would still come in and work the front or back counter and even cleaned the customer areas to include the restrooms. For me, it was getting the immediate gratification of seeing a job done well. Plus it had the added benefit of setting the example for some of my younger employees. It also served as a litmus test in a way. If they felt that job was beneath them, so was my desire to keep them employed.
Meeting Kayleigh:
I was working the counter when a young lady came in and she seemed really flush. Her skin almost matched her hair. She had a backpack and seemed to almost look the part of someone attending Coachella. She asked for some coffee and some water. I smiled and got what she asked for and also handed her a bottle of SPF 100 skin protectant. I kept some on the shelf in the back for occasions like this. The damage was done so to speak, but she still needed protection.
