Scott Waddell
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Scott Waddell

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Scott’s mother was often frustrated with him as a kid. He had a habit of taking things apart to see how they worked, deconstructing in order to reconstruct. Toys, old bikes, radios, —he’d disassemble them and use a hacksaw, a drill, and bolts to put their parts back together in different ways to make them unique and better. He turned a television into a fish tank, a PEZ dispenser into a toothbrush, and combined a mousetrap and a spoon to make a catapult. He once took apart a brand-new push scooter the very day he got it, hacking off the back so he could extend it two feet and make an extra-long scooter capable of holding two kids at once. A builder from birth, Scott’s heroes have always been imaginative makers of stuff: MacGyver, Doc from Back to the Future, James Bond’s Q, Data from Goonies. He wanted to be just like one of his fictional heroes, a maker of amazing things. Like many kids who are smart and creative, but different, he fell through the cracks at school. He didn’t fit in socially, the classes bored him, his grades suffered. But in middle school, Scott discovered code. That changed everything. He found his passion, using his time in school to hone the craft of coding. From there, the military taught Scott “adult skills.” While coding is a valuable talent, so is getting to work on time. The military taught him what it means to be accountable, how to handle conflict management, how to work on and with a team, and, most importantly to the life of a digital builder, how to embrace failure. Today, Scott considers success and failure to be essentially the same thing—just two expressions of learning. Scott still gets bored easily. In civilian life, he looks for adventure in unexpected places. If someone tells him something is impossible, he considers that an intriguing challenge. He’s committed to staying in the spirit of an explorer, always carving out his own trail.
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