For those of you who don't know, my passion for entrepreneurship was born at the inaugural Lehigh Valley Startup Weekend in 2012.  It ignited a passion that still motivates me today.  It motivated me to pursue social entrepreneurship and to found my nonprofit.

One of the things that I have noticed, though, is how few veterans I run into at these events - and that really confused me.  According to the SBA, approximately 40% of returning veterans would prefer to start their own business or 'not work for anyone but themselves'.  Veterans who start businesses are twice as likely to grow a successful business when compared to those who have never served.

So why do so few veterans participate in Startup Weekend?  I have my theories, but they're not substantiated by any research and fact.  Instead of focusing on why veterans don't attend, I thought I'd present my top five reasons why our local veterans SHOULD attend.

So Here Goes...

I know there are a lot of veterans who consider starting their own business or have great ideas but never test the waters because they are too risk averse or don't know if an idea is value-added and marketable.  Startup Weekend is an opportunity to test ideas and test the waters, with no strings attached.  You get to learn about the culture, the energy, and can discover whether entrepreneurship is something that kindles the creative fire inside you.  At the end of the weekend, even if your team wins the competition, you can walk away if you find that the environment doesn't work for you.  The only thing that is asked of you is that you focus and dedicate your time for one weekend.  Where you take it from there is completely up to you.  The worst that can happen is you find out, one way or the other, whether entrepreneurship is right for you.

Startup Weekend has an amazing energy.  A very talented pool of people get together for a weekend to generously offer up their talent to develop new applications, manufacture revolutionary new products, and more.  It provides a natural feeling of camaraderie that will feel very familiar to veterans.  This makes Startup Weekend an ideal environment for veterans transitioning out of the military.  It's non-threatening and everyone appreciates what you can contribute, regardless of your level of experience.  Not only that, participants break out into small teams of competent people to work on separate projects and depend heavily on each other to work autonomously on their portions of the work.  Talk about an ideal setting to soften the cultural blow for veterans just transitioning back into civilian life.  Additionally, veterans will meet like-minded people that they can relate to and share their passion with, making it that much easier to overcome the cultural divide between military and civilian life, allowing civilians and veterans to better understand the value inherent in their respective backgrounds. 

Very early on, organizers recognized that getting local companies and highly visible large enterprises (think Google and Coke, for example) had a vital role to play in supporting and sponsoring Startup Weekend.  Successful local entrepreneurs were enlisted to be mentors and judges for the events.  What those sponsors, mentors and judges discovered in short order was the inordinate amount of hidden and grossly underemployed talent attending these events.  Over time, Startup Weekend has become not only an event celebrating the entrepreneur in all of us but a hotbed for hiring talent.  I'll extend it a step further and tell my story.  In early 2012, I attended a hackathon organized by a local teach group called LV Tech.  It was there that I was first exposed to the generous and lively spirit common at other entrepreneurial events.  While there, I started talking to a guy that I quickly found out was a fellow vet.  He spoke very highly of hackathons and especially Startup Weekend.  After the event, we kept in touch and that fall, I attended the inaugural Lehigh Valley Startup Weekend.  It was an amazing experience and our team came in third. The team that won later became one of the most promising startups in the educational space, by the way.  Well, over the course of that event, I'd proven myself to be adaptable, reliable and motivated.  I made connections there that I still maintain to this day.  Time passed and the guy who had introduced me to Startup Weekend back in 2012 reached out to me earlier this year.  He had started a business.  He had a need for someone with proven writing skills and the ability to learn quickly on the fly to help with technical writing.  What started as a trial run for ten hours a week quickly morphed into a full-time transition.  He brought me on as his first W-2 employee just a few months later and I am now the Capture Manager for the company.  He saw my potential -  a potential in the intangibles that never get seen when large companies are screening thousands of resumes.  And it all started with an innocuous conversation and a Startup Weekend.

Veterans have a very valuable set of 'soft skills' that have been ingrained in them as a result of their military service.  Among these skills are adaptability, autonomy, teamwork, professionalism, decision making, and laser-like focus on task and mission.  These skills are a value added proposition for any team or company and especially valuable in the accelerated setting at Startup Weekend.  I have yet to run into a team that hasn't found working with veterans extremely rewarding and productive.  Many have come to realize this and have openly lamented the limited participation of veterans at these events.

The stigma surrounding PTSD affects all returning veterans.  About five years ago, there was a concerted effort to dramatically increase the awareness of the prevalence of PTSD in veterans returning home - approximately one in five veterans of the current conflicts is returning home with some degree of PTSD.  This was done very irresponsibly.  They succeeded in raising awareness but never followed up with educating people on how PTSD impacted our veteran community.  As a result, the prevailing stereotypes about PTSD that dated back to the Vietnam War are what the uneducated ended up believing.  The stigma has become so strong that they have actually given this PTSD-specific stigma a name - 'The Rambo Effect'.  As a result of the increased awareness, this stigma now negatively impacts the lives of all returning veterans.  Employers don't want to hire young veterans because they fear that they may be introducing a destabilizing element into their workforce.  All of the positive qualities I spoke of in the previous point are either forgotten or summarily ignored as a result of this stigma.  Veterans, with and without PTSD that attend these types of events, demonstrate the positive qualities that employers used to highly value.  By just being themselves veterans can prove just how wrong the prevailing stereotypes are - without ever even mentioning PTSD.

Veterans have a lot to offer.  I hope that the reasons I have listed above are motivation for more veterans in the Lehigh Valley to attend this year's event.  Lehigh Valley Startup Weekend takes place this November 14th - 16th.  As one on the organizers, and a fellow veteran, I'd love to see you out there.  For more information please visit their website.

I'd love to hear feedback from anyone reading this. If anyone has any questions or comments, don't hesitate to reach out to me!

It's been a very long two months.  I didn't trust myself to blog about what I was going through, so I haven't blogged about what has transpired.  I know I've always been very open about what I am going through, but sometimes you just need to take the time for yourself.

So here's the short of it:  My wife and I are getting divorced.  I know we said in earlier posts that neither one of us would take that precipitous step until we had been separated for six months, but things were just not working.

We didn't come to this decision lightly.  We committed to everything that we said we were going to commit to.  We have been giving every consideration to the impact this has on our daughter, went to marriage counseling, everything.

We attended multiple counseling sessions, together and individually.  What became very evident to both of us is that too much water had passed under the bridge.  I can't be to her what she needs and she can't be to me what I need.  Our life paths had diverged too much and there was no foundation of trust or communication for coming back from the precipice.

So...we talked. A lot.  About a month ago, we mutually agreed to move forward with divorce.  It happened on a Thursday.  That Friday, Saturday and Sunday that followed were the most emotionally intense days I have gone through since returning home from Iraq.  I completely imploded that weekend.  Emotions overwhelmed me.  The grief was intense.  I talked about it with a friend who has gone through divorce and when I told her that it felt like I was grieving for a death in the family, she told me something that I'll never forget.

Well, how about that.  It definitely put what I was feeling into perspective.  While it helped, I still had to confront what was happening to me and I had to do it quickly.  I didn't have a lot of time and I had to be functional for work.  Somehow I managed to pick myself up and dust myself off by the end of the weekend.

And then something amazing happened.

I found hope in a blunt assessment of my recovery from that weekend:  That was the most intense emotional episode I have gone through since I came home from Iraq and I'm still standing...I didn't disappear down the rabbit hole again.  I didn't let the depression consume me.

Don't get me wrong, I feel the depression and anxiety 'banging on the windows' trying to get in but I have held onto everything that I have learned, and held on fiercely.  I have now, at the core of me, a steely resolve - to do right by myself, my family, and my daughter.  The inner fire is burning bright.

Just for clarification, no I don't like that I'm getting divorced.  It's had quite the impact on my self-confidence and my focus.  I think about my soon-to-be ex every day.  I worry about the long-term impact this is going to have on my daughter, despite our collective best efforts to soften the blow.  It's impacted my ability to focus on work and has caused me to question my ability to perform the tasks I have to do at work every day.

I continue to struggle every day with this whole mess, but every day is another day I prove to myself that I have the strength to endure this and come out the other side, still capable of loving and laughing.

So, what now?  Where do I go from here?  That's the trick.  I don't know.  But I'm looking forward to the journey.  I want to turn the page and start a new chapter in my life, but I really have no idea where to start.  One thing I know for certain is that I will be sharing that journey with all of you.

Yes, my PTSD has taken its toll on my life but life didn't end when we decided on divorce.  All I know for certain is that I don't want to take this journey alone.  I just need to figure out what the hell that means for me and what I want to do about it.