Welcome everyone to episode number 106 of underserved.

Joining me today is Paul Dingwitz, CTO at the Zeal Network.

Let's get started.

Welcome to this week's edition of Underserved, the podcast for the rest of the tech industry,

where we focus on stories of tech industry leaders, their insights,

and their lessons learned. And now, your host, Andrew Jolina.

Paul, thank you so much for joining us today on underserved. Thanks for having me. I'm certainly a

pleasure and very much looking forward to having a great conversation with you

and your audience today.

Absolutely.

You grew up in beautiful Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I assume you were enjoying the outdoors and the beach much more than hammering a keyboard.

Looking back, I certainly wouldn't say it was the roughest start.

Quite the amazing place in terms of having all of the elements at your disposal, whether that's the mountains that aren't far away or the ocean. But yeah, tech wasn't my first thoughts when I was younger. It was probably the beach in the ocean. Now, you had some full-time jobs pretty much when you were at high school, right? Yeah, I mean, I think early on came from a sort of a military family, interesting background in terms of sort of the home life, didn't have a lot of money, didn't have a lot of resources at my disposal. So, you know, my mom was pretty straight with me and said, if you want different things in your life, you have to learn pretty early that you're going to have to go work for it. So it started off early for me. Of course, like any teenager, hey, I want that freedom. I want a car.

I want to be able to go to the beach and do things with my friends and play sports and have all these different things. And I had to get a job. I did the same thing. I see you were a dishwasher at a restaurant. I did that as well. What are the jobs you doing back then? Yeah, I mean, you look back and you kind of just chuckle and laugh a little bit to yourself in terms of the journey that we all take in life. And I think, you know, mine in particular was, you know, whether it was a dishwasher at a restaurant until sometimes one or two in the morning and getting up and going to school again at 8 o'clock in the morning and after school, going to football practice or soccer practice and then going and working again. So rents and repeat,

rents and repeat. I think I had sort of a spectrum of jobs, which I think all brought different

sort of value propositions and learning experiences that you don't really see until you're older.

McDonald's isn't so bad on the surface. But I think when you choose a McDonald's down at the beach

where there's not many other restaurants and there's no

public toilets. McDonald's becomes sort of the catch-all. Little Caesar's Pizza. I worked at car

dealerships cleaning cars. I spent one summer doing roofing, which is probably, you know,

kudos to those individuals because that has to be some of the hardest physical, just relentless work

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