Chris Stegner is co-founder and chief executive of Very Big Things, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that he started in April 2018. He grew up outside Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and near Seattle, Washington, sold a 3D graphics website as a young teenager, and worked as a car salesman and then a programmer before founding the company.
Growing Up Near Oklahoma City
He and his brother spent their days outdoors on the land behind the family house, he told Fort Lauderdale Illustrated. His parents ran an air conditioning and heating business, and when he was 10 a building owner who had ordered a large job left the country without paying, and the business closed (Mixergy). The family moved to the Seattle area, where he first used a computer in his fourth-grade class. “I literally fell in love,” he said.
A Website on 3D Graphics
At 12 he persuaded his parents to buy a computer and taught himself 3D graphics and web design. A site he built to share what he was learning became a leading reference on 3D programming and drew advertisers from around the world, and another company bought it about a year later.
After the dot-com crash in 2000 he gave up on computers for a while. After high school he sold cars in Olympia, Washington, and made six figures but was miserable. At 22 he quit, moved to Florida and took a computer programming job that paid $20,000 a year. After his first day, he recalled, his thought was “I am so happy.”
Starting Very Big Things in Fort Lauderdale
He spent more than a decade at technology companies in South Florida, including Z9 Capital and Mad Dev, improving as a programmer and learning to work with clients, and tried several startups of his own. He started Very Big Things with six people he had worked with over those years, and within two years it had 55 staff and offices in Croatia and Ukraine.
On Mixergy he repeated advice from other chief executives that “a great CEO is extremely optimistic at all times, but also the most paranoid person on the planet,” and said he spends his days thinking through how each situation could go wrong while believing fully in where the company is headed.