The Concept of Platforms
Brick by brick we build a life. Each day we add to or take away from the life we want to have in the future. In that sense, our life is like a platform. It is a platform for our future self to stand upon and do the things we desire.
We are also interacting with platforms all around us. Our hometown is a platform, the company we work for, a blog or book can function as a platform, community organizations like a foodbank are platforms. We can be intentional with our time and abilities and help those platforms be their best and, in return, we can benefit from the good they provide.
I have always enjoyed learning through hearing people’s stories who have traveled to places that I want to go and accomplished things I want to accomplish. My goal for this blog is to share some of my own stories, and stories of people I have worked with, in hopes that something helps you along your journey.
About Me
I’m Shawn Jenkins, the co-founder of a high growth software company based in Charleston, SC. We founded our company, Benefitfocus, in 2000 right after the dot-com crash, yet grew it through the turbulent 2000s. I served for seventeen years as the CEO, from startup through our Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2013, over $1b valuation, and past $250m in annual revenue in 2017. In early 2018 I decided to retire early, and we promoted our management team who has continued to grow the company.
Prior to co-founding our company I had all sorts of jobs, from working on deep sea fishing boats as a teenager to becoming a commercial pilot and flight instructor in college. Eventually, I learned to design and build software by buying books at Barnes & Noble, which propelled me to experience the thrill of a tech startup.
In 2015 our family had the incredible opportunity to join with the Medical University of South Carolina and help create a new children’s hospital here in Charleston. Supporting this new children’s and women’s hospital along with the community has become the joy of a lifetime for us, and we feel it will be part of our family’s life for decades to come.
Most important to me, I am a husband an father of five. Here are a few more snippets: grew up in Daytona Beach, FL, surf kid, had a rat tail and earring, delivered pizza for Domino’s, worried about money as kid of single mom, did not go to college right out of high school because I did not think we had the money for it, eventually went to college and became a pilot, worked for a world mission agency after graduation and traveled around helping people in developing countries, stumbled upon Charleston, SC, and still am amazed that I get to live in such a beautiful location. Lemon meringue pie, Clemson football, generational Steelers fan, favorite color was always blue until i moved into a house on the salt marsh and now it’s that mid-summer spartina grass green.
A Bit More About My Why
I enjoy writing. My story has a similar thread to many, in that I was not graded well in English classes as a kid. Math was my subject. I spent too many years thinking, incorrectly, that since I was good at math, I was not good at writing. Fortunately, I learned to write as a survival skill in my career and over time caught up on the essentials of writing. However I still welcome help with grammar (thank you, Jacob!).
I hope to help people design and build things in their lives that serve them and those that they love well. By sharing my experiences and those of people I interact with, I hope that these stories are useful to people in creating things that bring good.
As a father, I want to pass along what my experiences and learnings to help my kids. The main thing is to help my kids not be stopped by fear. To not fear the big world or failing at the things they attempt. From a practical standpoint, I want to share things to help them (and you) with money, career, building businesses, giving, decision making, motivating yourself, and more.