The time that I embarrassed myself in front of hundreds of Ethiopians

If you want to start a successful career as a tech entrepreneur, definitely don't do what I did.

Chicago, unlikely origin for a story about Africa.

It was January 2013 and I had just dropped out of my PhD program.

It was a shit start to a shit year. I was 25, a bit of a jackass with no friends, and had about $400 to my name. I moved in with my future ex-wife into a postage stamp-sized apartment in the Chicago suburbs which, after years of grad student living, seemed excessively palatial, even though we could barely squeeze through the bedroom door. And I didn’t know it then, but I was about to develop a recurring caffeine-induced pain in my left ear that feels like your friendly neighborhood ballista-sharpener installing a tooth implant.

The only thing kept me warm those winter nights was a dream: to become so rich that one day, I could become an independent scholar free of academia’s politics. Unshackled from my colleagues’ small ideas, I would revolutionize the world! I would become the next Karl Marx! (But rich!)

It wasn’t until much later, when I had deconstructed my entire identity in therapy, that I saw that I was suffering from intergenerational trauma-induced delusions of grandeur, commonly treated with alcohol. It took even longer for me to be diagnosed with ADHD by a dodgy online nurse practitioner. To be fair, it wasn’t that she herself was dodgy (she was also from Arizona, not that that made her less dodgy), rather it was the business model of the app for which she worked that was dodgy and that probably incentivized her to diagnose me with ADHD. I should rephrase: despite the questionable circumstances of my diagnosis, I definitely have ADHD, and I definitely should not have the meds that are helping me write this article taken away from me. As the meandering nature of this article—or blog post, or naked ploy to get you to subscribe for $7/mo.—should attest, I likely have ADHD and, by the same token, am ill-suited to a scholarly life spent patiently scrutinizing ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Secret Archives (which I did one summer, but I’ll write about that later).

Where was I? Right. Alcohol.

You see, it was January 2013 in Chicago. I had just quit grad school, and although I was drinking myself under the La Salle St. bridge, I had big dreams. I would become independently wealthy by somehow combining my PhD dissertation research on Ethiopian travelers to medieval Europe with programming, which I learned when I was younger.

Naturally, I set my sights on the most lucrative form of programming there is: indy video games. I would make a game about Ethiopia’s untold critical role in the development of modern science.

The idea didn’t seem far-fetched. I grew up on hardcore historical simulators like Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron, but they were for PC. It was 2013 and no one had made such a game for mobile yet. What if I cornered the market? And if not me, this odd mashup of humanist scholar and software engineer, who else?

This is how I took my first farcical steps toward becoming the middling tech entrepreneur that I am today.

The logo

My first step was to do some market research and make a smoke test. It’s important when writing software—when building any product, really—to figure out whether anyone wants your product before you actually build it. I started reaching out to key influencers, working my way through Steam Communities and gaming subreddits…

Just kidding. Obviously, the first thing I did was to pay my long-lost Austrian half-cousin $200 for a logo. You can have an album without any music, but you can’t have a band without a name and a logo.

My new company’s name was Pendulum Gameworks, named after the proverbial pendulum of history. A naive American freshman who takes a US history course in college and learns about their country’s crimes for the first time turns into a little Malcom X—swoosh, that’s the first swing of the pendulum. But as they learn even more history, they learn nuance. They learn to deconstruct the deconstruction. They learn the biases of those uncovering bias. Swoosh—that’s the sound of the pendulum swinging back. Learning history, I figured, was a process of swinging one’s worldview back and forth until the pendulum settled somewhere in the center: Buddha’s middle path. My educational games would be a road to enlightenment.

I had my half-(or step-?)cousin, a talented designer by the name Günther, make the logo. At least, I think it was Günther. That may be his DJ name. Or maybe his brother designed the logo, which looked like this:

It’s actually a really nice logo. The ™️ is bull, there never was a trademark.

I’ve never met Günther or his brother. The only reason I have distant Austrian relatives is because my grandfather, a Turkish Air Force pilot, had an affair with a US Air Force colonel’s wife while he was stationed in Biloxi, Mississippi in the 1950s. When his posting was up and he was recalled back to Turkey, the poor woman apparently wanted to come back with him. To which he said, “touch grass!”

Fast forward a pregnancy, a couple generations and some transcontinental sojourns by one very mystical half-(or step-?)aunt, and I’m Paypal’ing her kid Günther $200 USD for a logo that will only ever be seen by my parents, my ex-wife, a few hundred Chicago-based Ethiopians, and now you.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the emails that I sent Günther anymore. Below is the most faithful reconstruction that I could patch together from memory:

Hi Günther,

Thank you for agreeing to make this logo. Here’s some background that might help you understand what I’m looking for:

1. History is but a pendulum that we all succumb to. It swings hither and thither, and with it, the very nature of our minds change. I want to capture the essence of this change in the logo.

2. It’s not just that history enlightens us by helping us see wiser (or more correct? ha!) positions to guide us through life. I want to emphasize that it is the very nature of the positions themselves that changes through the process of learning history. My gamers will go through so many life changes as they play these games, and this logo will be the entrepôt to this new lifestyle.

3. Obviously, I trust in your judgement as an artist above all else. Please feel free to modify or disregard any of the above or below points if you feel that it contradicts your aesthetic spirit. I want you to feel empowered as an artist, and I want Pendulumers to feel empowered by your spirit.

It went on like this for several more points, as I recall. Günther was a total pro and replied “OK no problem, give me two weeks.”

The logo wasn’t anything close to what I wanted, but honestly it’s a really solid logo and better than what I deserved.

The research

As I waited for Günther to finish the logo, I started sketching out a game based on my dissertation research, which was on Ethiopian visitors to medieval Europe from 1200 to 1500. It boiled down to this:

1. Some ancient and medieval European theories and models suggested that the world outside of Europe was uninhabitable and undiscoverable.

2. One of these theories, the torrid zone, said that the equatorial belt was too hot for human life even though Europeans traded in and eventually colonized those regions. Yet textbooks and treatises as late as the 1600s still talked about “the torrid zone” as a thing.

3. Not only did Europeans go to the torrid zone, but torrid zone dwellers came to Europe—for example, Ethiopian ambassadors to European courts, well before the European colonization of the tropics.

4. How could Europeans have ignored the fact that they lived in and knew people from the torrid zone? And what does that say for “scientific progress” if we’re able to collectively ignore super obvious facts right under our noses for hundreds of years?

I never did answer my questions in grad school, although my colleague Nicolás Wey-Gomez pretty much nailed it. Instead, I decided to turn this jumble of thoughts into a video game.

I had a nice thought: what if instead of some random white-passing Turkish kid making a game about Ethiopia, a country I only knew from academic research, I got some buy-in and thoughts from Ethiopians instead? Maybe I’d even find a co-founder.

One Google search later, I found the Ethiopian Community Association of Chicago (ECAC) . I called them up and spoke with one of ECAC’s leaders; let’s call him Abel. I told him that I was making a game about Ethiopia and I wanted see whether the community would be interested in supporting the project.

Abel’s interest was piqued. He invited me to come talk about it in person.

Take me to church

I showed up to my meeting with Abel totally unprepared. You’d think that I’d have thought of something on that interminably long train ride from my apartment to Rogers Park, the remote Chicago neighborhood where ECAC is located.

Here’s what I thought about instead. When you live in Oak Park, a leafy suburb just 15 minutes from downtown, every insufferable hipster technically within city limits will cut you down to size if you claim to live in Chicago, too. Even though they might live 50 minutes away in some godforsaken studio out in Rogers Park, they will make you suffer.

I got over my pissy mood and put on my game face when I arrived at ECAC. I was here to discuss business. Maybe Abel could connect me with other scholars or programmers, someone who could grow the business. Or maybe—just maybe—we might discuss financing for this worthy cultural project. The word “Kickstarter” was ringing in my ears. I was ready to hustle.

But Abel, who was a gentle middle aged man with kind eyes, had a different plan. He invited me to see their church, which was part of ECAC’s building.

We walked from his office on the second floor down a staircase to the basement. He opened a door and I followed him through.

Before me lay a cavernous warehouse that had been converted into an Ethiopian Orthodox church, hidden in plain sight. Large industrial fluorescent lighting tubes illuminated enormous prayer rugs on the dark gray concrete floor.

“This used to be AT&T. Now we pray here,” he told me with a smile.

This was a place of refuge hewn from America’s rustful past: Lalibela on the prairie. It was an honor and a sign of trust that he let me see this magnificent place. I felt disarmed and a little naked. I felt ashamed of how eager I was to hustle this helpful hand. My host was on a different level, showing me that the best business is never a hustle. The best business is barely even business.

After getting back upstairs to his office, Abel called in a surprise guest: an Ethiopian Orthodox bishop, who greeted me kindly and asked about my research. I felt the room begin to glow softly as I opened up, warmth meeting warmth. I was hungrier for more something deeper than money.

I was hungry for the love that they poured on Donald Crummey.

Dr. Crummey was an illustrious scholar whom I had the honor to have met shortly before his death. He was the doyen of Ethiopian studies, lord of his field, and somehow I had convinced him to write me a letter of recommendation for my dissertation research.

Every Ethiopian I talked to seemed to know and love Dr. Crummey, or Don as he was affectionately known. Invoking his name unlocked doors at the embassy when I applied for a visa for my dissertation research, and it unlocked smiles at ECAC as I mentioned that he had blessed my research.

“Don!” Abel and the bishop delightedly exclaimed.

Growing up, we had our own Donald Crummeys in the house. My father admired American scholars like Cornell Fleischer—or, more unfortunately, the Armenian Genocide-denying neocon Bernard Lewis—for their dedication to Turkish and Ottoman history. These names were talked about with respect at the kitchen table. But I have yet to find an equivalent to Ethiopian culture, which to me seemingly combined a deep and broad reverence for scholars with a first-name affinity for them.

I had quit grad school because I felt misunderstood, unappreciated, and miserable. But maybe, if I did right by the Ethiopians, they might love me as Don Jr.

A stroke of genius

Riding on this high, I started talking about the idea for my game. I wanted to make it for phones so that everyone could play and especially so that young people could learn about Ethiopia’s history.

That’s when I had a stroke of genius:

“You know, I have a demo that I’d love to share with the community,” I blurted.

This was a lie. What I had was a $200 logo by Günther and a business registration in the State of Illinois. But I had the certainty that, if I had to, I could hack together a demo over a weekend.

Abel’s eyes lit up.

“That’s great!” he replied. “We have our quarterly leadership meeting in four weeks. How about you share your demo then? You can hook up your laptop to the projector. There’ll be dinner.”

Hot damn, I thought. Just a few days ago, I was a PhD dropout with Xcode and a dream. And now, I’m an entrepreneur being offered an opportunity to pitch to this community’s leadership at their quarterly meeting! I’m good at this.

I was so good, in fact, that I was annoyed that I had to wait four whole weeks. “No problem,” I replied confidently. With a touch of arrogance that I was convinced they would find charming, I added, “It’s a bit far from now but I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

We shook hands. The deal was sealed.

Real programmers don’t read docs

Any self-respecting entrepreneur has the common sense to build something only if it’s necessary, and any self-respecting programmer has the misplaced confidence that they can build anything in a weekend, if necessary. I believe that successful tech entrepreneurs figure out a way to harmonize these two contradictory impulses, and I am nothing if not a serially unsuccessful tech entrepreneur.

I had promised a demo that I didn’t have and that I needed to whip up on short notice. The obvious move would have been to download Unity, a well-known game engine and editing environment.

I did in fact download Unity right after my meeting with ECAC, and I did open it:

What am I even looking at? Who the fuck knows. I said: “probably easier to write a game engine myself.”

The resulting effort ate up all four weeks of my runway. By the end, I had the crappiest lil’ 2D tile-based rendering engine you ever saw. No sound, no UI, no input, and no textures. Just a bunch of janky green hexagons floating in a dark void that crashed every time you panned too far to the left. I wrote the engine using Objective-C, a loathsome language with a syntax as charming as a sweaty Microsoft executive yelling “Developers, developers, developers!”

I kept working on that stupid game engine until the morning of the ECAC meeting. I had nothing even remotely resembling a game. I was in very deep trouble.

I had no choice but to fire up Unity again. Again, that inscrutable initial screen. Fuck. Fuck. How the fuck does this thing work.

Turns out, it’s not that hard, you just need to read some docs and look up a tutorial on YouTube. I became acquainted with the basics:

There’s the editor screen, which shows you a scene, kinda like a movie. You can put objects in the scene. A camera provides a visual perspective, which could be first-person, birds eye, or whatever. You need a light source to see your objects through your camera, just like in real life. Finally, you add a bit of code so that you can control your objects with inputs like the mouse or keyboard.

Seriously? That’s all? I was kicking myself for having waited this long.

I anxiously looked at the clock. 1:30 PM. The meeting was at 6 PM. Minus the 45 minute train ride and assuming that I skipped showering, which in those days was a regular occurrence, I had 3 hours and 45 minutes.

Fuck. What’s the most basic fucking thing I can put on the screen?

As it turns out, this:

It’s a map of Africa. Well, “map” is a generous word. It’s a silhouette of the African continent floating in a void.

I look at the clock again. 3 PM. What’s the most basic representation of a player that I could put on this map?

It’s a sphere. An untextured, perfectly round, white ball. You can move it around the map like this:

Oops, you moved off the map and have fallen into the void. The good news is that you don’t die because the pendulum of history and time are illusions.

This embarrassment was my demo and would have to make do. By the time that I figured out how to make the ball move on the map, I had just enough left over to shower and head uptown to ECAC. I threw my laptop into my backpack and, with a gnawing pit in my stomach, got on the train.

Demo night

I felt like throwing up the whole ride over. I’ve had always flown by the seat of my pants, asking my teachers extensions for every paper and skimming the assigned readings ten minutes before class. But that was class, and this was the real world. My dreams were on the line, and I was failing.

Still, I tried to maintain my composure and some semblance of bravado. “The leadership team doesn’t know programming,” I told myself. “It’s hard work. I’ll explain that it’s super alpha early days, just toying with concepts. They’ll understand. I’ll be back.”

The first thing I noticed when I got there was the parking situation. Thank God that I took the train because street parking was packed. Must be a concert somewhere, I thought.

I notice lots of people filtering in as I approach the ECAC building. I ask someone if they knew where the leadership meeting would be. She looks at me quizzically and says, in a confused tone, “upstairs.”

The steady stream downstairs has now turned into a throng approaching a pair of doors. As I get close, I see something altogether unexpected.

The “leadership meeting” was actually a general meeting for the entire Ethiopian community of the greater Chicago area. I see hundreds of people seated at tables dozens of feet long inside a massive hall. Massive buffet-style food stations dole out delectable stews as kids run around. At the front, four seated women roast coffee beans over camp stoves, their helpers grinding and brewing behind them. A DJ plays Ethiopian music near the front, where there’s a makeshift stage set up with a mic, a projector, and one lonesome-looking HDMI cable dangling from the side, waiting for some poor sucker’s laptop.

Whatever bluster I had managed to retain sank like a rock inside my guts. These good people had taken me in, put their faith in me, and I was about to make a total ass out of myself with this absurd excuse for a demo.

What about being misled into thinking this would just be a small meeting of ECAC’s leadership? I racked my brain trying to understand where I had been wronged, when it dawned on me: I had made the whole thing up. Abel never said anything about a leadership meeting, he just said that there would be a quarterly meeting. Truly, I was the sole author of this unfolding fiasco.

Baffled and shaking, I made my way to Abel, whom I saw smiling and waving from across the hall.

“Hey, you made it! Welcome,” he greeted me.

“Yeah. You know, just so we’re on the same page, this is gonna be a really simple demo. Like, really simple. I’m still in the research phase, it’s going to be more about my research than the game demo,” I explained.

“OK, that’s no problem. We’re just glad you could make it. Find a seat, grab some food, and I’ll call you up when it’s time,” he replied. Abel was killing me with kindness.

I grabbed a plate of injera with some meat and sat down next to a nice family. We made some small talk as men with massive novelty-sized bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label patrolled the aisles, topping up the tiny white plastic disposable cups that everyone had for drinking whiskey. The more we talked, the drunker I got.

Abel came up to the stage to interrupt this feast and began speaking. He kicked off a series of speeches in a mix of Amharic and English that I didn’t understand.

After what felt like an interminable wait, Abel switched to English and announced that we had a special guest. He’s a young man making a video game about Ethiopian history and that he would be talking about his project and performing a demo. With that, he called me to the stage.

There was some brief applause as people searched around and spotted my pasty face. I apprehensively took the mic, and I started to speak.

And I killed it:

Imagine a broke grad student who goes all the way to the Vatican to uncover the hidden life of Ethiopians, who—he’s convinced—were secretly critical to the development of modern science. This grad student couldn’t afford a hotel or even a hostel, so he camped two hours outside of Rome in the July heat, schlepping forty pounds on his back every day to the city and back, just for a chance to read these important manuscripts. What he found was big—so big, that he decided to go to the source, to mother Ethiopia herself, and learn Geʽez with the blessing of [dramatic pause] Donald Crummey himself.

[Audience gasps.]

But this young man’s story was so explosive that the academy couldn’t contain it. So he quit grad school to create a startup and take this knowledge to all the people of the world who need to know about Ethiopia’s glorious role in the development of modern science. And he spoke the language of the people: video games.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am that broke grad student. Still broke, but not a grad student. Your community is my new teacher and I’m but a student. I can’t tell this story without you. I need you.

I stand before you tonight in humility, ready to give you the tiniest taste of what’s to come.

The crowd was enthralled. Every word I said was true and the people knew it.

That’s when I pulled out the laptop from my backpack and plugged it in. Günther’s $200 logo briefly flashed on screen. The crowd waited in anticipation.

I loaded up Unity, and I pressed play.