My name is Tyler Link. I studied entrepreneurship at the University of Dayton. My freshman year I joined a student-run business as a retail clerk at an on-campus convenience store called Rudy's Fly-Buy. By senior year I had gone from clerk to Director of Marketing to President of Retail. Although some students were just looking for some extra beer money, I treated my role as an opportunity to implement the strategies I was learning in the classroom.

I'm most proud of the marketing plan I created using the school mascot, Rudy Flyer, to present the store not just as a place where you could buy your coffee and nicotine, but as your friend who's always there when you need him. "Rudy's is there for you" became our tagline and my love for creative brands was born.

A summer-long study abroad trip through Asia between my junior and senior year opened me to the wonders of the world. I had been bitten hard by the travel bug. As I looked forward to my post-college life I wondered how I would integrate my love for business and my love for travel. Thus, the conflict was born.

When I graduated my friends all took jobs at big companies with big salaries and big benefits. I moved across the country to be employee number one at a company that had the best minds in internet marketing teaching paid search, SEO, analytics, social media, and conversion optimization.

I had big plans for my career, but life intervened. In 2009 my dad was diagnosed with ALS. Eighteen months into my new life I moved home to Chicago to be with my family for what turned out to be the last year of his life.

I was fortunate enough to be able to work remotely for six months during that time and though I was already quite familiar with The 4-Hour Workweek and the budding digital nomad scene, this experience hardened my view that the ability to work remotely is a core value of mine.

With the downsides of delaying life fresh in my mind, I resigned my position at Market Motive. Over the next few years I spent three weeks in Turkey, a month in Colombia, and four months in Uruguay and Argentina in between time at home in Chicago. When I returned home from my lengthy stint in Buenos Aires I did so with one goal in mind: to resolve the conflict between my desire for a life of work and a life of travel.

"I feel like I can't win because I want both. I want both equally." - Espree Devora, on work and travel in Episode 2 of Power Trip.

I decided the best path to this new life was to learn a skill I had dabbled with for years: designing and coding websites.

While working at Market Motive, I ran an ecommerce store selling cornhole sets to refine my skills in online marketing. The design was raw, but it served it's purpose.

My first project after leaving my job was an ecommerce store selling chef knives, which I had developed an affinity for after receiving a set of Henckels knives from my parents. It turns out I was more interested in developing the website than in selling knives and the knife companies were not at all interested in selling to me. Believe me, I asked.

While the store never came to fruition, I did become proficient in Shopify's liquid templating language while building the store's theme. This type of utilitarian design was going out of fashion as more stylized ecommerce experiences became popular. So I moved on, focusing my efforts on learning Ruby on Rails.

This led to the development of what I call the Swerski's NBA Trade Tool, an alternative to ESPN's NBA Trade Machine, something you may be familiar with as fans of Bill Simmons. Recently I launched a still very buggy version of Grantland's TV Trade Machine:  http://www.swerskis.com/tv-trade-tool. An NBA Draft Big Board and a March Madness Bracket Builder are also in the works. Other websites in development include a dead-simple way to sell used iPhones and a language learning site that has you speaking in complete sentences on day one.

As you can see, I always have numerous projects in the works designed to expand my skills and explore my creativity. Call it the Pieter Levels approach to life and business. Adding Rails to what I already knew of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript meant completing my base of knowledge on building websites from frontend to backend, to go with my professional experience in online marketing.

While I'm by no means a master of any one skill, I have the jack-of-all trades skillset that you're looking for and a self-taught ethos to expand my skills to whatever the job demands. 

Now that I've told my story, let me tell you the vision I have for Tortuga's Story.