AirAllow
AirAllow started with a break-in. In a college internship, the team handed me a 2001-era PHP app that secured schools and hospitals, and told me to find the vulnerabilities everyone suspected but nobody had proven. I had a SQL injection working on day two.
The lead engineer looked at the exploit and said, “Okay, now fix it.” I submitted the patch, watched it go live, and felt a circuit complete. Breaking software is easy. Building it and securing it is the hard, interesting part.
The original author of that software heard I had hacked it and recruited me to his startup. At AirAllow we built Bluetooth-based access control: locks, the firmware protocol boundary, the backend, the apps. We started with a blank file and turned it into a product that is on the market today.
The lesson
That was my first zero to one, and it set the direction for everything after. Once you have taken a blank file to a shipped product, normal jobs feel like maintenance. I have worked at startups ever since.