My story
The long
way home.
I grew up taking things apart to see how they worked, and I never really stopped. These days the things are businesses: how they win attention, how they turn it into revenue, and how good software quietly compounds both. It took a few detours to get here.
- 1994
Dressed for the job since kindergarten Taking things apart
Cincinnati, Ohio
Born to Jon and Laura Deal. I grew up on Legos, sports, and a family PC with a dial-up connection I mostly used to mod video games: my first taste of changing how something works instead of just using it. My parents split when I was ten, and I got an early education in figuring things out for myself.
High school
Thirty-five hours a week landscaping and making sandwiches, with football practice in between. I spent my GPA on everything except homework. Work ethic was never the problem; sitting still was.
- Navy
Petty Officer Deal, 2013 Seeing the whole system
Charleston → Seattle
With my GPA, college was out. The Navy's nuclear program was in: the hardest school that would let me earn my way through it, with a six-figure career waiting on the other side. I hated the mechanic's work and kept the engineer's brain: nuclear school is all systems, thousands of small things that have to hold for the whole thing to stay stable. That's still how I build today.
USS John C. Stennis
Dry dock duty on a nuclear aircraft carrier: a floating city taken apart and put back together around us. If I ever needed proof that big, complicated things only work when the small stuff is done right, the shipyard was it.
The hard part
I left the Navy early after losing one of my closest friends to suicide. He was one of the good ones. The loss hit a hard reset on what I thought mattered, and mental health has been personal to me ever since.
- 2017
The first Uptrade Exchange office, 2017 Coming home to build
Cincinnati, Ohio
LA & Manhattan
No degree and rent to pay, so I learned to sell: B2B on both coasts. In Manhattan I watched a barter exchange run on made-up currency with runaway inflation. A lot of businesses were in, the idea was right, and the money was wrong. Crypto could fix it, and this was before the boom. I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Back in Cincinnati
Moved home to build that exchange. Bootstrapped it for a year; it needed two million dollars and a founder who knew what he was doing, and it had neither. The pivot became Uptrade Media, and as the work became web development it became Upforge: kept the up, kept the logo, but this is about building, not trading. More than 150 projects later, it's a small team shipping work we put our names on.
- Now
The whole crew The next chapter
Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky
Two builds running at once: expanding Upforge, and building Sonor, the platform that makes Upforge hard to compete with. Today Sonor runs our clients' sites; the product era comes next. And at home, four kids make sure none of it goes to my head.
