Strength of Character

Josh would hesitate before putting his own son through many of the childhood trials he experienced himself.  But looking back, it’s clear that these challenges helped make him the man and business leader he is today.  Indeed, protectionism now reins in the philosophy of child rearing, but for Josh, the gauntlet of experience that shaped the strength of his character stems from the same place as his entrepreneurial instinct: his father.

For a few years in the 1980s, Josh’s father, who was a clinical psychologist by training, ran the largest distributor of floppy disks in the US.  At first, he put his young son to work boxing, labeling, and stuffing envelopes.  “In the beginning,” Josh remembers, “it was just shrink wrap and envelopes.  But it wasn’t long before I was sweating in the basement on another project.”  After being outmaneuvered by larger operations, Josh’s father created a company called David and Goliath, which recycled computer parts.  Starting with shells of computers, they would rebuild them with new parts in his garage, and then resell them with more memory, faster speeds, and other features.

“That was when my education really began,” Josh affirms.  “My dad would call me down to the basement so we could solder motherboards together.  I would never take my own kid down to solder motherboards.  The fumes alone!  But you didn’t know back then—you just opened the window and did it.”

Josh’s early start with computers and hardware formed a strong foundation for the eventual explosion of information technology.  But beyond technical skills, Josh learned a more valuable lesson from his father’s ventures.  “From him, I learned how to take risks,” Josh says.  “Even if they ended up in failure.  It was something he had a passion for.”  Now the cofounder and CEO of Uppidy, a text message archiving, search, and retrieval platform that allows people to own their own data, Josh reflects back on those early experiences as the foundry within which his strength of character was forged—the strength of character so critical to entrepreneurial success today.

Equally influential, Josh’s mother taught him the opposite, demonstrating the importance of stability and being fiscally cautious and vigilant.  “My mom was much more conservative,” Josh says.  “She was smart with her money, saving it in a nest egg that she never touched.  My dad was completely different.  Even though he was a psychologist, and he always gave steady advise, he was still willing to take a lot of risks and face challenges.  They created an interesting dichotomy for me to learn from as I was growing up.”

It was a dichotomy that, even while Josh was still very young, would become even more pronounced.  When he was seven years old, his parents divorced, and very suddenly, Josh had to grow up fast.  “Right away, my parents became more like people to me,” he recalls.  “They changed from the omnipotent figures most kids that young think of as their parents.  But I also realized I was more in control of my own destiny than I had thought.”

Indeed, Josh had more freedom, but with that freedom came more responsibility.  On a given day, he could decide if he wanted to be up the street at his father’s house, or down the street at his mother’s.  “That may seem like a small decision, but it’s not one a seven-year-old typically makes,” Josh points out.  “My own son, who’s six, likes to have us by his side at all times, which is a stark contrast to what I had growing up.”

By the time Josh was in high school, he had spent most of his time living with his mother.  His father had continued his entrepreneurial path, and had ended up living in Connecticut.  He invited his son to come live with him in a converted cider mill that was attached to a barn and garage, built into the side of a small cliff.  “I went to live with my father, and I remember one day in particular, when there was a massive thunderstorm,” he recounts.  “A friend and I were in my room, getting into trouble.  The storm got worse and worse, and that’s when we heard it.”

Amid the clamor of the storm, a heavy, deep scraping sound carried through the entire house.  A two-ton boulder situated in the cliff above the garage had been knocked loose by the storm, rolling down the cliff face and into the driveway.  In his room, Josh and his friend froze, when suddenly, the bedroom door was swung open, and his father stood ominously in the doorway.

“There I was,” Josh says, “wearing my dad’s hippie leather hat, with Led Zeppelin playing loudly.  Smoke from my room wafted around him through the open door and out into the rest of the house.  My father just looked at me, then shut the door and left without a word.  I knew I was in trouble, and that it wasn’t going to end quickly.  But I had no idea what I was in for.”

As fate would have it, the massive boulder was blocking in two out of their three vehicles.  Josh’s father sent him to the hardware store for a sledgehammer, a pickaxe, and a wheelbarrow, and then laid out his sentence.  “For the next few weeks, I was a one-man chain gang,” Josh says.  “My mom went ballistic when she heard about it.  But I told her that I had made a mistake and that I should pay the price.  Meanwhile, I spent three weeks breaking this rock up for hours a day.  Just to break it in half took three days.  I learned very quickly that you can’t lift several 50 pound pieces off the ground in a row.  You need to break each into smaller pieces, or you’ll break your back.”

By the end of the experience, Josh had built up substantial muscle mass, and had earned a place in the family’s epic of child rearing.  “My father raised four boys, and to this day, he tells me he wishes he had another rock for each of them,” Josh reports.  “In some ways, I needed that rock to help me learn how to become a man.  But nowadays, there’s no way anyone would do that to their kid.”

After high school, Josh went to the University of Kentucky, where he struggled academically before finding his way as an upperclassman and graduating with a degree in history.  Upon graduating, he moved back to New York and got into radio ad sales.  After diligently working for nothing for eighteen months, he began to move up quickly through the ranks, and before long, he had reached a six-figure salary.

“At that point, I was happy to turn that crank,” Josh says.  “I was in my late twenties, getting married and buying my first apartment.  Why the hell would you change that?  You would have to be crazy.”

What came next was perhaps the most significant and pivotal moment for Josh, and it came long after his childhood had ended.  But on that day, many of us still had a certain kind of childhood to leave behind.  “On September 11th, 2001, a colleague and I were late to a meeting at Windows on the World,” Josh recalls, referring to the restaurant at the top floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.  “We decided to just blow it off and go get a bagel at a bodega.  As we walked in, the first plane hit the north tower, and all hell broke loose.”

Josh watched in horror as the TV in the bodega showed footage of the north tower on fire.  Flames erupting from the building were followed by far grislier scenes, by now well known by nearly the entire world.  “It was terrible,” Josh recalls gravely.  “Even now, eleven years later, it’s unimaginable to me.”

In the wake of the tragedy, Josh was struck by an idea.  “I thought we should give free advertising to our clients for a few months,” Josh says.  “Not only was it the right thing to do, but it would build loyalty.  Going forward, those clients would never leave us, even in the face of aggressive rate increases.”  Josh’s boss was all for the idea, but the company’s owners declined.  “I thought they were crazy,” he says.  “They expected me to go to lower Manhattan, or to our clients’ temporary offices in New Jersey, and ask them for money just weeks after this horrific tragedy.  It was just crazy.”

Josh struggled to recover the steadiness of his pre-9/11 life, but a series of funerals of people who had been his clients, on top of moral trepidation over his work, left him depressed and listless.  He spent a lot of time in front of the television. “I couldn’t go back to what I was doing,” Josh affirms. “I didn’t feel right.  My wife said, ‘You know, you can keep doing this, or you can decide you’re going to do something else, but at some point you’re going to have to get off the couch.’”

Then his father called.  He had happened upon a business model that leveraged the internet to tap into the booming real estate market.  By generating leads through online ads and turning those over to agents, he was returning on his investment at a rate of 10 to 1.  In this new life, far from the address book with so many clients’ names marked out as a constant reminder of the terrorist attacks, Josh could see a way forward.

“Before 9/11, I felt that even though I’d had turmoil in my life, I was on firm ground,” he remembers.  “And then I realized there was no such thing.  You do the best you can to mitigate risk, but you can’t know what will happen.  I decided I wasn’t going to waste what time I had.  I decided to give the whole ‘starting my own business’ thing a shot.”

With his wife’s blessing and support, Josh left ad sales behind, took another page from his father’s book, and founded e-Agent, a lead generation platform for real estate professionals.  The business was a success, and he served as CEO of e-Agent for five years, until whispers of the housing crisis began to emerge.  “I realized that real estate was careening off a cliff,” Josh says.  “What was really interesting was that we could see it happening on the internet in the trends of our leads.  We sold because we could see what was coming, and we wanted to be proactive”

After e-Agent, Josh founded Brand Click, an in-text advertising solution to protect brand names, but Uppidy remains his most promising venture yet.  “Right now, the device manufacturers and carriers are in ownership of your data,” Josh explains.  “We’re trying to give that ownership back to people.”

Interestingly enough, the idea came when Josh dropped his phone in the toilet.  When he went to AT&T to retrieve the information he had lost, the carrier told him he needed a subpoena.  “They had my driver’s license and social security number—everything they might need to identify me,” Josh recalls, exasperated.  “And even if I subpoenaed them, they were only prepared to give me my data printed out on perforated sheets of physical paper.  I did what every New Yorker would do, which is get angry and swear and then say, ‘I’m going to go do something about this!’”

Yet unlike every New Yorker, Josh is actually translating that resolve into action, and as a result, his big moment may be in the works.  After securing initial funding from contacts in the mobile telecommunications space who were quick to see the ideas value, Uppidy was founded in 2011, and later that year, Josh found further financing in angel and venture capital.  Having control of one’s text messages is the missing piece of the puzzle when it comes to cross-platform social media, and just this summer, a potential buyers’ interest indicated that Josh is on to something real.  Uppidy now has users in the range of tens of thousands, and they are rapidly approaching 25 million stored text messages from senders and recipients outside their base, which is approaching half a million in number from 46 countries and in close to three dozen languages.

Today, Uppidy is eager to explore ways to leverage this stored data, but it remains firmly committed to user privacy.  “One thing we promise to do is not to go in and look at the raw data with human eyes,” Josh says firmly.  “Instead, we plan to strip identifying information and explore trends in topics.”

Uppidy’s future certainly looks bright, but what will Josh’s own future hold once it is built and sold?  “I don’t know if I will build again,” Josh says.  “I’ve said that before, but I’m not sure I’m the right candidate to continue doing this kind of work.  I think I’ll be better in a role that’s further along.  Launching businesses is very stressful and requires a tremendous amount of energy—energy that I have, but would like to focus elsewhere.”

One such place he’d especially like to focus that energy on is his son.  His wife is Japanese, and their son is bilingual, going on trilingual.  Even at six years old, the young man already runs 5Ks and has traveled to Europe and Asia.  “In one way,” Josh says, “I’m jealous of myself on his behalf, of having the tough experiences I had and knowing there’s no way in hell I’ll repeat those for him.  And at the same time, I’m able to provide for him in ways my parents couldn’t for me.”

Now, as a parent, Josh knows one of the greatest gifts he can give his son is a good education, and he’s determined to do so.  “One of my great regrets is the time I spent screwing up in school,” Josh says.  “I should have been a much better student.  I should have picked a different path—like astrophysics, which is something I’m really interested in.  Everyone was telling me that I was good at it, but either I wasn’t getting the message, or I didn’t want to hear the message.”

In advising young people entering the business world today, Josh also highlights the importance of empathy.  “As I get older,” he says, “I’m starting to understand that everyone has gone through their own pain and suffering, and how important it is to recognize that.  When you meet people, it should be with the understanding that they’ve probably had something happen before you got there.  Be less aggressive and more willing to let things play out, as opposed to forcing them into the place you want.  I like to try to shut up and listen.  There is wisdom in the joke that God gave us two ears and one mouth.”  In recognizing and being cognizant of the trials others have withstood, one is in a better position to understand and grow from one’s own experiences, both good and bad.  Indeed, the one thing life can be counted on to provide are both highs and lows; it’s up to the person navigating that terrain to determine how he or she will grow, learn, and build character from it.

‍