I was at a dinner two months ago — which is what people in LA call it when six people eat tacos at someone's kitchen island — and someone asked me what I do for a living.
Simple question. Should have a simple answer. It doesn't.
"I run a telecom company," I said. Which is true. Varayo is my primary thing. Fiber, towers, infrastructure — the stuff that makes your internet actually work. Real business, real employees, real headaches that don't care what day of the week it is.
But that's not the whole answer. Because I also run a tech company. And a holding company. And a nonprofit. And a publishing imprint. And I'm building a podcast. And I hand-coded this entire website at midnight because apparently I have a clinical inability to sit still.
The person at the dinner asked the obvious follow-up: "So which one is your real job?"
All of them. That's the problem.
It Started With a Problem Nobody Was Fixing.
The first business I started wasn't born out of ambition. It was born out of annoyance. I looked at something that wasn't working, waited for somebody else to fix it, got tired of waiting, and decided to fix it myself. That was it. No napkin sketch. No mentor pulling me aside with sage advice. No MBA case study moment. Just a guy who got frustrated enough to do something about it.
That was the beginning of a pattern I still haven't broken.
Here's how it works: I notice something. A gap, a frustration, an opportunity that nobody else seems to care about. And instead of writing it down and moving on like a normal person, I start building. I register a domain. I set up an LLC. I'm three weeks deep before I realize I've accidentally started another company.
My accountant has a dedicated section of her filing cabinet labeled "Darrell's latest thing." I'm fairly sure there's a sigh drawn on the folder.
I don't start companies because I think I'll get rich. I start them because I physically cannot look at a problem and not try to fix it.
Nobody Grows Up Wanting to Work in Telecom.
No kid puts "fiber optic infrastructure" on their career day poster. You don't see ten-year-olds playing pretend tower lease negotiations in the backyard. Nobody watches a movie about the guy who runs fiber through a municipality and thinks that's the life for me.
But here I am. Building the invisible stuff that makes the visible stuff work. And I love it — not in the way people love their passion projects, but in the way you love something you're genuinely good at and that genuinely matters even though nobody will ever thank you for it.
Telecom is unglamorous. It's permits and easements and municipal meetings and cable runs and tower contracts and conversations about right-of-way access that would put most people to sleep in under four minutes. It's the kind of work nobody thinks about until their signal drops in the middle of a Zoom call and suddenly everyone's an expert on network architecture.
I chose it because it's real. Not "disrupt the paradigm" real. Not "we're reimagining the future of connectivity" real. Actually, physically, cables-in-the-ground real. When I build something in telecom, it exists. You can point at it. It carries data for thousands of people who will never know my name, and that's fine. The infrastructure doesn't need credit. It just needs to work.
businesses I'm currently running. Not counting the blog, the podcast in development, or whatever I'll inevitably start next month.
The Myth of Focus.
Every business book written in the last twenty years tells you the same thing: focus. Pick one thing. Go deep. Become the world's greatest at that one thing and let everything else go. The word "focus" appears on LinkedIn approximately eleven million times per day, usually next to a stock photo of someone staring at a mountain.
I've read those books. I own some of them. They're wrong — or at least, they're wrong for people like me.
The focus advice works for a certain kind of person. Someone who has one burning passion and wants to dedicate their entire life to perfecting it. That person exists, and I respect them enormously. But that's not me. I have seventeen burning interests and they rotate based on the day, the news cycle, and how much coffee I've had before 9 AM.
And here's the part the focus evangelists never mention: running multiple things makes you better at each of them. The pattern recognition I've developed from jumping between telecom, tech, publishing, and nonprofit work is something you cannot get from staying in one lane for thirty years. Problems in one business look like solutions in another. Connections form across industries that nobody in either industry would ever see on their own.
Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Do I sometimes wake up at 3 AM because I remembered I forgot to send an email for one of the five things I'm running? Every week. But I'd rather be tired from building too much than bored from building too little.
I'd rather be tired from building too much than bored from building too little.
The One That Matters Most.
I'm going to say something that might surprise people who know me primarily as a business guy: the nonprofit — Project I For One — is the one I care about the most. Not the most profitable. Not the most impressive on paper. The most important.
Because everything else I build is about infrastructure, or technology, or making systems work better. The nonprofit is about making things matter. And I know how that sounds — like a guy trying to rebrand himself as a philanthropist at a dinner party — but I don't care, because it's true.
I don't talk about it much. I'm allergic to people who use charitable work as a personality trait. You know the type — can't order a coffee without mentioning their volunteer hours. That's not me. But since this is my blog and I make the rules: if you're building businesses and you're not thinking about what to do with the leverage they create, you're just accumulating. And accumulation without purpose is just hoarding with a nicer name.
I Know How This Sounds.
I'm fully aware there's a version of this essay that reads like a humblebrag. "Oh, look at me, I have too many companies, what a burden." I hear it. I can see the eye rolls from here.
But this isn't about bragging. This is about the compulsion — the thing in me that will not sit still, will not coast, will not be satisfied with one thing running smoothly while there's a problem somewhere else I could be solving. It's the same thing that has me in college classrooms at midnight and hand-coding websites and starting podcasts about things nobody asked me to have opinions about.
It's not ambition the way LinkedIn defines ambition. It's closer to a condition. I build things because I don't know how to not build things. The moment I stop, I feel like I'm wasting time. And I know that's probably not healthy — I know some therapist somewhere would have a field day with the words "pathological need to create structure" — but it's who I've been since I was a kid taking things apart to see how they worked and putting them back together with extra pieces left over.
The people who know me best stopped asking "why are you starting another thing?" a long time ago. They've moved on to "what is it this time?" with a look that's equal parts curiosity and concern.
Honestly? That's the only question I've ever needed.