American Antigravity was founded in my darkest hour -- the day that I was laid-off from AT&T Wireless in 2002. I'd been a company man for nearly a decade, and worked my way up from entry-level work to managing a 400 person department and 10-million dollar annual budget. I'd been making a great salary, and recently purchased a house in the suburbs.

For me, everything had been going well until the beginning of 2002, which was generally a dark year for everybody in the tech-industry. It was an interesting period of time, because I got to watch the people that I'd looked up to literally turn on each other for a now-limited pool of economic resources.

Most people talk about the "profound turning point" that changes their perspective on things -- that "something was missing in life" line that you see in so many books. Is it life affirming to think that despite a series of bad events that perhaps we find something more important in the process? Is that a requirement -- some driving goal of fate that we must suffer in order to learn and grow? Personally, I don't buy it...I think that sometimes bad things happen for no reason at all, and that we as human beings attribute motives to events that are sometimes so large and impersonal that the impact on our personal lives is something that never receives mention.

I remember the day well -- the night before had been my last real day at AT&T, and also the day that I'd finally passed a tough Sun Solaris SysAdmin test that I'd set as a yearly goal for myself. It had taken a full 3-months of study to achieve it, but when I was finally done I'd gone home and built my first successful Lifter, after seeing a demo online at Naudin's site.

I was laid off in the morning, and in an unusual move I'd had theentire day to sit in the office and get more and more depressed. By 3pm, I'd already wrapped up all of my pending work duties, and in an unusual move for me, I was upset enough about a variety of factors that I didn't want to put the extra effort into making the last day special. Normally, I'd stay in the office for a few hours and wrap up all the details that were important for my replacement to know, but this time I just didn't care.....

Using a copy of Microsoft Word on my PC, I began building what would later become the main page for the American Antigravity website. At the time, it was the only page that I'd built, and despite having done E-Commerce work for years I made some bad choices....one of those was designing it in MS-Word using a web-plugin, which makes table-layout easy to achieve, but at the price of bloated, unwieldy code.

My plan had been simple: build American Antigravity as a small website, and then shelve it once I'd shown it to a few friends. The poorly-written code that I'd generated was fine for a few visitors, and the large mpeg-videos that I put up to show my Lifters in action were only meant for a few downloads --more than enough for a small website with only a few visitors.

As it turns out, life doesn't work like you expect it to -- I went on the Art Bell Show a few days later, and received 50,000 visitors. Between the steady traffic & media appearances, I'd been so busy that what I ultimately generated was an enormous, 200+ page website based around fundamentally unchanged code. To give me some credit where it's due, I have done a lot of work in cleaning up the website code over the last 3+ years, but in the final analysis there were flaws built into the structure that were impossible to remove.....

Sometimes the design flaws that you don't even realize you're making come back to haunt you later.