On today’s show I have Tyler Tringas. Hmmm… what to say about Tyler. Well - He’s got to be one of the most well-rounded and intellectually curious dudes I’ve ever met. Tyler has done a bunch of different work in his relatively short career.
After undergrad, Tyler worked as a consultant for a clean energy startup and pretty quickly realized he had an entrepreneurial itch. Shortly thereafter he started a solar energy company called SolarList, and after fighting the good fight for a few years - had to walk away from that startup after racking up $50,000 in credit card debt.
On the side, he was doing some freelance coding work, and uncovered a popular need amongst his clients, which led to his second business - Storemapper. This time, Tyler grew his small business into a fairly sizable company, all while traveling the world as a digital nomad, and 5 years later ended up selling the company with a nice little exit to live off of.
Now Some people would take the money and go
fuck around for a few years or forever for that matter, but instead Tyler asked himself - what work would really matter to me if money wasn’t an object? That question landed him at a company called Maptia, who’s mission is to foster empathy through storytelling - and do yourself a favor and go get lost in the Maptia website for a while. That position actually led him to work with some of the biggest National Geographic photographers in the world, where he became the Chief Operating Officer at an ocean conservation content creation company called Sea Legacy.
As if that wasn’t quite enough, this summer Tyler left Sea Legacy to pursue perhaps his most ambitious and exciting project yet. Tyler’s always been obsessed with the problem early stage entrepreneurs have securing financing. To address this problem, A couple months ago, Tyler launched a platform for early stage bootstrappers called Earnest Capital, and the buzz it’s already created in entrepreneur and lifestyle hacking circles is pretty awesome.
Anyway, enough of me blabbing - let’s get to the interview. Oh and by the way, this conversation got a little long because it was so damn interesting, so I’m splitting it into two episodes, part 1 and part 2. Part 1 will cover how he taught himself to code… advice on learning to code, Solar List, Storemapper, building a lifestyle business, the digital nomad lifestyle, rock climbing, and clean tech and in part 2 we dive into knowledge sharing and Transparency, Maptia, Sea Legacy, changing hats and stretching your limits in the name or learning and growth, doing stuff you don’t know how to do, risk tolerance (or lack thereof), and Earnest Capital.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
New Energy Finance (clean energy startup acquired by Bloomberg)
Ruby on Rails (Coding language)
Upwork (Freelancer marketplace)
David Heinemeier Hansson or DHH (Creator of Ruby on Rails and CoFounder of BaseCamp)