Stacey Ferreira | Founder of Forge

TL;DR

Stacey Ferreira recounts starting her entrepreneurial journey at 18 with her brother: they pooled $3,000, moved to South Central LA, and built a single-sign-on product called My Social Cloud. After responding to a Richard Branson tweet, she borrowed $4,000 from her father to fly to Miami, met Branson, and subsequently secured a $1.

Key insights

• Early obsession with computers and self-teaching via W3Schools led to coding skills; she and her brother learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on weekends.
• Her father required financial independence as a condition for starting a business, forcing them to move out and manage their own savings ($3,000 pooled).
• They reduced rent from $900 to $450/month by subletting one bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment in South Central LA, giving them a 3-month runway.