Are you fed up with the corporate bullshit holding you back? Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. The ultimate launchpad for entrepreneurs ready to seize control and unleash their creative genius. Hosted by Phil Better, the podcast mogul. Each week he's breaking the chains of conventional work with bold strategies, raw insights, and inspiring success stories from the digital entrepreneurs who took the risk and invested in themselves. This is your call to arms. Invest in yourself, break free from someone else's rules, and build the empire you deserve. Now let's dive head first into today's explosive episode.

Welcome to another episode of Invest in Yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I'm, of course, your host with the most feel better. In this episode, we are gonna be bringing you the tools, strategies, and insights to level up your business, with a must listen episode for anyone unders sorry. For anyone looking to understand how tech and data can accelerate your entrepreneurial journey, our guest is someone who has been at the forefront of software development and innovation. He's the CEO and founder of Particle forty one, a dev firm made up of industry veterans dedicated to helping scaling, move faster, and smarter through software development, DevOps, and data sciences. If you're ready to learn how to scale your business, leverage data, and streamline your process with the latest tech, then this episode is for you because we have the legendary Ben Johnson on the podcast. Ben, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, Phil. It's great to be here today.

Ben, I'm excited to talk to you about everything you're doing at Particle forty one, but also more importantly about your journey as an entrepreneur. So we're gonna start with the first question. Why did you become an entrepreneur? What made you decide to jump into this crazy world of entrepreneurship?

Yeah. So I think entrepreneurship is the greatest way to, I mean, obviously, to make money on your own terms. So my very first job, I think I was 12. I started my my paper route, and I could deliver the paper. I could go collect the money, and I could go afford the latest kicks and live life the way I wanted to. I didn't have to depend on my parents, for those things. So I think, on some Nicares and then, a Nintendo Entertainment System. Of course, I'm dating myself here a little bit.

But, you know, those are things I wanted, and I didn't want to wait for somebody else to give them to me.

So your first real venture into entrepreneurship was the paper route. Like most, great entrepreneurs, they start with the small things. What was your next venture after, you know, when you started aging up, getting into, you know, high school and college and university and that, what were some of the the, entrepreneurial ventures that you went through?

So in high school, you know, we we, junior high and high school, we were messering with the Commodore 64. Right? We we couldn't do there it wasn't instant messaging. And so to see some of these things come out as we're graduating high school, you know, I'm coming out of high school going into college during the .com boom and just seeing how awesome it is for things to go from, you know, from from phone calls and walk in visits into on prem stores to now online. And so the first, the first real professional job, was with a with a company that was just doing exactly that, helping people put their catalogs online, ecommerce platforms. But when I really sunk my teeth into my first venture, it was an online travel company. And that online travel company was based in Odessa, Texas, so not a not a place that you would typically think of a tech company coming from. And we got to basically build the Internet. I mean, we got to build a data center in Odessa, Texas because the cloud didn't exist, and, we wanted to take a a travel agency that was right next door, and we wanted to bring them online.

We wanted them to be able to take ticket orders from a ecommerce experience. This all sounds super trivial now, but back then, it was not. And we were, you know, we were trying to figure out things that just weren't weren't widely available.