As one door closes, another opens

During the last 5 months, I've had the opportunity to work with an early stage start up, Tone Mobile LLC located in NYC. As of yesterday, the entire team learned that we just received our final paychecks due to the financial situation the company was experiencing. I was on vacation this past week and just got back from taking my son to the hospital. One hell of a week! Overall, I didn't regret the time I spent here as it gave me the opportunity to learn first hand about QA and get into the process. My QA lead mentored me these last 5 months to learn the basics on manual testing, sanity testing and regression testing. Definitely will take this further with learning about automation to become a more well rounded QA tester.

Prior to starting my role as a Technical Support Lead at Tone, I was the Customer Support Specialist at DramaFever for about a 1 year and 3 months. I left DramaFever in November 2015 to join Tone for an exciting opportunity. For the first time in my career, I was able to build a team and process from the ground up. This journey wasn't easy. I spent the last 10 years trying to get my foot into the door in the IT world but was turned down countless of times. Eventually, I found a way around it by serving as a Customer Support Specialist at my first start up. That was when my journey began in the start up world and took off from there. My first day on the job was tackling a queue of several hundred tickets with a team. Eventually, I went on to lead a team for the late night shift when late mentor/friend stepped down from his post at the time due to his health. The queue eventually swelled to 1,000 tickets as our normal volume. Yes, it was exhausting but we were able to work overtime and get that queue down.  I enjoyed the work. Unfortunately, I also fell ill back in February of 2013. After visiting my doctors, I was recommended to take time off to get myself back on track. As much as I tried sleeping during the day and working in the late night hours, I couldn't adjust to it and as a result went through 6 months with very little sleep.

Once my doctors gave me that wake up call, I had to leave my role at the start up to take the next 2 years off to recover and be healthy again. This was when I joined DramaFever as part of a growing support team. At the time the support team was only the Customer Support Manager, 2 full timers and 2 part timers. We made the rules as we went. Eventually, the team grew to 10 members. I also ended up taking ownership and responsibility for the mobile app support tickets for our iOS app and Android app when the company expanded and my manager had to oversee the other projects. It was a great experience because this propelled me to my new passion for mobile apps and eventually getting my foot into the door in QA. I've also managed the FAQ's and wrote guides for our app. 

When my manager moved on to his new role at another start up, it was also my time to move on as well since the company was then acquired by the WB. It was hard leaving my team behind but I knew it was the right time to go forward and take my new experience further. I remained in contact with my manager till this day and continue to help out with beta testing their products. It's my way of thanking him for putting me on a great path. Never will forget this. 

Finally, this brought me to Tone. We worked directly with the governments and US State Department on distributing our phone kits to villages where mobile access is non existent or limited. We developed an app to allow fishermen in Indonesia to communicate with one another. The experience was awesome and I enjoyed hearing the feedback from our remote team on the ground. It was also the first time I've led a team overseas and till this day my new team and I remain in contact with each other on WhatsApp. I've also wrote guides so that our team in Indonesia can translate them for the fishermen and train them to use our apps.  These last 5 months seemed like a blur but I will never forget the experience. It helped me gain a better understanding about the early stage start up world. It can be risky as some start ups become successful companies while others fail. I had a great run here and will never forget the experience. I enjoyed working with a team overseas and hope to visit them someday in the future. We became friends over time and this is a bond we will never forget.

My first time leading a team through failures and success

There are times where we rise to the top and then we make mistakes and fail. Unfortunately, after suffering from some setbacks, self esteem can take a blow and it'll make a person doubt themselves. However, through those moments of failure are opportunities to learn and do better the next time around. I'm also glad that my friends and my co-founders from my online community stuck with me these past 13 years. We're still here and we're still going strong. What started out as a gaming community for PC games for family and friends grew into an extended family. There were some decisions that were great and led us to success. There were some decisions that were not so great and it led to people leaving us. However, one thing I've learned these last 13 years was that this was part of the growing process. As my community grew, I went from being the oldest member of the team to being the youngest. We've had people come and go but eventually, the right people came to help us grow and we've stayed together since. In short, change is part of the growing process. To become successful, we can’t stay in the same behavior or same patterns. We have to evolve, learn new skills and improve ourselves.

It was very scary starting my own project because I didn't have any funding and did not know where it'll go down the road. This also presented an opportunity to explore the unknown and try new things. It took some time as we went through trial and error. When our members wanted a game server for a game we played: America's Army, we needed funding to get the server. We tried getting sponsorship but that failed. We then went with donations from members. Through our fundraising campaign from fellow members, each person donated $5.00 a month in order to pay for our server. We assigned a designated treasurer who handled the money. This required trust. We went with the eldest member of the community, my co-founder who is a father of 4 and enjoys building websites. Each member voted and we decided that my co-founder Rick would be in charge. I’ve also decided that it was time to hand the reigns of leadership to Rick because of his experience and I can learn from him. Rick became my mentor. Letting go of something I built from the ground up was a decision that took me some time to think about but to ensure its success I knew things will be in good hands with Rick at the helm. Each month, we submitted our payments to him. The additional funds also helped pay for our website until the stock market crash of 2008 when almost all of our members lost their jobs. So to cut back on expenses, we had to cut the servers and moved our communications to Facebook which we still use today. Throughout the years, we've adapted and we learned from mistakes. This helped us grow together as a team.

After looking back and talking to the people involved in growing our community, this gave me hope and inspiration. We catch up on each other every now and then to see how we're doing as we move forward into our own lives. But one thing that keeps us together is the bond we share.

Recently, I've had to remember why I started this journey. It's been awhile since I've led a team and I've had my setbacks before but given this opportunity, I'm looking forward to doing it again. My late mentor, Dr. Janice Jackson once told me "the hardships you endure will only make you stronger. You'll prosper from it in the end. I can see it. I'm proud of you". I still have that memory playing in my mind each day when I encounter obstacles in life be it in my career or in my personal life. The hard work finally paid off when my son Michael Rafael was brought into the world and now my new opportunity awaits at a new company where I can do some good. I'll be helping people in remote parts of the world get Internet access on their mobile devices. This is a dream come true. Of course, not everything is flowery. I'll have to part ways with the people at my current company in order to start new. It's part of the growing process. Change is part of life and is what helps one grow as a person. When we fight against that change, we stop growing.

I've had to greatest mentors in my life and glad to be able to learn from them. It's time I make them proud and take that next step in my life to lead a team for a change and to be part of a growing movement to help those less fortunate be able to get Internet access.

My philosophy professor, Dr. Sarmento told us the following advice from the day we started his class and reminded us this advice on our last day in class:

"The unknown is what we fear. To fear the unknown is not worth living. To live, we must explore the unknown. Failure brings experience. Experience brings us wisdom. Wisdom makes life bearable".