Natalie Ford: Where Technology Meets the Wilderness 🌍⚡

From Zero to Neuro-Hero 🚀

My story is different than you might think—it isn’t one of those "it all started in a garage" stories. It actually started on a mountaintop in Nepal, during a panic attack, after breaking my laptop, with a wilderness vision for my work . I was 23 and fresh out of MIT; totally disoriented. The tools of the corporate 9-5? Soul crushing. The tools of startups? Terrifying! The true terror? Spending my life turning someone else's vision into reality. So I sold everything (even my beloved vintage motorcycle 😭), and bought a one-way ticket to nothing.

The Meltdown that Built Me 💥

Three months into backpacking around Southeast Asia, I had sunk to the bottom—the bottom I mean, sleeping in a hostel mismatched with cockroaches bigger than my future, eating instant noodles for weeks, and crying in internet cafes because my code failed. Then, it happened. The chance encounter with a paralyzed monk in Chiang Mai, who communicated through blinking. His eyes held untold stories from beyond. That night, I drunkenly wrote the first draft of a brain-computer interface (BCI) headset on a napkin.

"You're a girl—stick to apps" 🙄

Investors laughed. "Too science fiction." "Where's the ROI?" One even said: "sweetheart, maybe do something ... prettier." (Joke’s on him—I built a $20M neurotech empire while he was busy mansplaining). Bootstrapped meant long days coding and building prototypes at co-working spaces in Bali, testing prototypes on backpackers (shoutout to the German dude who let me scan his brain while he was on an ayahuasca trip 🍃), and hustling like my life depended on it—because it did.

Why Follow Me? ✨

I’m not here to brag about "disruption" or post sterile tech bro content. I’m the disheveled, adrenaline junkie, neuro-geek, who is going to teach you how to:
- Hack your own brain 🧠⚡
- Build a business that does not make you want to yeet your laptop into the ocean 💻🌊
- Travel while building code on a beach (or a yak farm—no judgement 🐄)

P.S. My DMs are always open. Message me if you’ve ever cried over a bug in your code or a broken heart. Both suck 💔🔥