Michael
Doran.

I didn't come up through Silicon Valley. I didn't grow up with privilege or influence.

I grew up in a Silent Generation household in suburban Illinois where business was still personal, where your word mattered, and where my dad built relationships the old-fashioned way - face to face.

For most of my life, I've been an outsider. Misunderstood, mislabeled, underestimated. I know what it feels like to be seen as something you're not.

I also know what it feels like to rebuild yourself from the ground up.

In my early 20s, a skydiving accident nearly killed me. I survived. I taught myself how to walk again. I rebuilt my career one step at a time.

And in the process, I discovered something I've spent my entire professional life trying to fix:

After recovering, I spent the next 25 years in recruiting - helping more than two dozen VC-backed startups scale, working alongside Google, Dropbox, Bolt, Oyster, and Minno, and building teams in some of the most intense environments you can imagine.

It didn't take 25 years to realize the system was broken. It just took me that long to understand why.

We handed our data, our relationships, and our professional lives to platforms that were never designed to serve us. They were designed to extract value from us.

So I founded SourcedOS. A platform built on a simple belief: your data should belong to you. Your relationships should belong to you. The tools should work for you - not the other way around.

Then came Free The Data. A movement born out of one idea: if we want a better internet, we have to build it ourselves.

AI has finally given us the power to create without gatekeepers. To build without permission. To take back what we've quietly given away for two decades.