About John Wessel
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I am John Wessel, developer and owner of Lucid. I began programming Lucid in 2003 at the age of 17. I'll tell that story in a moment.
My father is a consulting traffic engineer. I learned about engineering and consulting culture around the dinner table. Dad taught me that a regular hour is 60 minutes but a billable hour can last all day.
Computers have enthralled me since the earliest possible age. I was 13 years old when a friend showed me GeoCities, the 1990s website where you could build your own website. I was hooked! I taught myself to program. Four years later (and ever since) I began developing Lucid.
I earned a B.S. in mathematics in 2008. I met my wife a couple of years later. We married in 2016. She bore me a son in 2019 and a daughter in 2023. They are raising a ruckus outside my door as I write. Noise-cancelling headphones are life. Pray for my wife.
Values
- Veritas — because there can be no better path
- Competence — because consequence is the measure of choice
- Conviction — because though life is short, it is also long
I do not seek to please. I aim at virtue which consequently pleases the best people. Pleasing all the people is too humorless.
Business is an excellent template for people to cooperate. We can quickly occupy our roles and produce something more valuable than its inputs.
However, like all models, business is merely an approximation of reality. If people are sacrificed to target metrics then the cart has been put in front of the horse. We ought to remember the first principle is to serve people.
Origin
I was 17 in the summer of 2003. I had quit high school because the customer service was unsatisfactory. My résumé was that I had redeveloped the City of Westlake Village's website. Dad had helped me get that gig but nonetheless worried that I was on the fast track and would never do any real work. He angled to get me a summer job stenciling DON'T DUMP — DRAINS TO OCEAN in the Sacramento heat. Alas, another engineer father beat him to it.
Instead, I went to work in an air-conditioned office as an intern for Interwest Consulting Group. I was assigned to Penny, a tough woman who intimidated building inspectors. She had gone back to school to earn a business degree. They gave her a me and another intern to practice supervising on.
Then-startup Interwest was growing fast. New employees came on board almost daily. Employees submitted their timecards as Excel spreadsheets by e-mail. That was vaguely manageable when the company numbered a couple dozen employees. The next dozen overwhelmed billing.
Amidst the magical chaos of a startup, Penny tossed me into the timekeeping and billing vacuum. I made good progress. I skipped the fall semester to keep working.
Interwest was one of several consulting firms serving the recently incorporated and rapidly growing City of Elk Grove. One day, the city manager declared, “Everybody has to use what Interwest is using because they're the only ones not misbilling us.”
That got my attention! For a couple of months, while the other consultants sorted out their systems, everyone filled out their timecards in my system. I realized there was a potential for a product. I asked the owner if I could spin off. He graciously agreed.
I served Interwest for another 20 years. Interwest grew from 30 employees to 400 and from one client to hundreds, each with their particular billing requirements.
My relationship with Interwest ended after it was acquired by SAFEBuilt. Nevertheless, I remain close to the people from Interwest. The very talented and ethical former employees of Interwest coalesced into new companies and they chose Lucid. Everything old became a startup again. Just like before, they're growing fast.