Hi, my name is
Jarod Ferguson.

If you had told me 30 years ago this is how my life would turn out, I would've gawked in disbelief. I might've even laughed at you.

In grade school, I was writing my first lines of code. By high school, I was using drugs and in and out of the system.

I know that sounds wild. How does a bright kid go from coding and watching Voltron to being in an episode of Breaking Bad?

This is how.
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The Beginning
I was born in Dallas, Texas, surrounded by turbulence and dysfunction. My parents were young and not ready to raise a child. My father, James, grappled with addiction, and my mother was reliant on my grandparents, Royal and Ann.

Adoption was the plan for me. But they couldn't sign the papers when they saw me and chose to keep me instead.

My father would only see me once.

Standing in that living room, I believe my dad was faced with a decision: get it together or lose this family. Looking down at me in my mother's arms, he chose heroin instead of fighting for his son.

Three months later, my father was tragically killed in a car crash on October 6th, 1976, at 2:32 in the morning.

My mom and I moved to Bountiful, Utah, with my loving grandparents and six aunts and uncles. When I turned four, my mother and I moved into our own place. Not long after, my Aunt Jacquie joined us. She nourished me with all the love and attention a child needs.

The little I remember about this time is happy.
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A Spark in the Darkness
Around my sixth birthday, my mom met an alcoholic Vietnam vet who would eventually become my stepfather. For the next several years, I lived in fear of this man and the physical abuse he'd hand out at his leisure.

His violent rage and emotional tirades stripped me of any sense of confidence I might have had.

I turned inward and found comfort in my creativity. I'd spend hours playing with toys, taking things apart, and exploring. Those quiet moments gave me a way to escape and sparked my curiosity about how things were made and how they could be changed.

When I was seven, my mom signed me up for a summer programming class. That's where I first learned BASIC and Logo. I'd sit at the computer, spinning in my chair, coding little turtles to scoot across the screen.

At the time, it just felt like fun. I had no idea I was uncovering something I was not only good at, but would grow to love.

Then everything changed.

My Aunt Ceci saw my stepdad push me backward down a flight of stairs. She called my grandparents, and my grandpa drove six hours from Boise to pick me up.

The next day, I climbed into his truck and left that house for good.

That was the last time my stepdad ever hurt me.
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From Stability to Struggle
I loved my grandparents more than anyone in the world. Ann was a nurse and counselor. Growing up in the streets of London during the harsh realities of war, she learned to navigate life with resilience and spirit.

Royal Jay was an agronomist born and raised in a small town in rural Idaho. I loved going to work with him. I vividly remember early mornings driving in his truck to farms throughout the countryside and walking fields together.

One day, as we stood at the top of the stairs, my grandfather asked, "Do you want to go back and live with your mother?"

I didn't hesitate.
"Never."

And that was it. I moved in with my grandparents permanently.

Living with them brought a sense of stability I hadn't known before. Boy Scouts. Ski team. Competitive soccer. Church. Sunday dinners.

I started building computers from my Uncle Michael's hand-me-downs. Those computers gave me a space to escape into a world where my genius could thrive.

But it would be convenient to say my grandparents' love was enough to erase all my pain.

That would be a fairy tale.
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Losing Myself Again
As I grew into a teenager, the trauma that had laid dormant began to emerge. I began to look for people as broken as me. I searched for connection and acceptance, which led me to drugs and alcohol.

First, drinking beer at parties. Then smoking pot. And eventually, much worse.

On Christmas Eve, when I was sixteen, I snorted my first line of meth.

Meth consumed me, and the only thing that mattered became doing more at any cost.

The next few years blurred into a haze of addiction and reckless behavior. I had no regard for my life. My grandparents tried everything they could, putting me in rehab several times, but by nineteen, my choices caught up with me.

After a string of crimes, I was incarcerated for nine months.
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A Call to Change
My life could have easily continued down this path, and if it weren't for what I think of as the call, it probably would have.

Standing in a dim corridor with a cold prison payphone pressed to my ear, the sounds of the block echoing around me, I heard two life-changing words:

I'm pregnant.

I knew immediately what decision I had to make. The one my father didn't.

He chose heroin. I chose responsibility.

I might not have loved myself, but I knew I would love this baby.

That was enough.
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Rebuilding Through Work
After my release from prison, I stayed clean and worked at a machine shop. With the encouragement of my roommate, I applied for a technical job at a call center supporting HP printers.

Honestly, given my record, I thought it was a waste of time. But I scored so high on the interview test that the manager decided to take a chance on me.

Within a few months, I was awarded "Best of the Best" as the number one agent in a call center of over eight hundred people. Being recognized for my abilities felt terrific.

Finding myself behind a keyboard again, I began writing code, building websites, and completing courses and certifications any chance I could get. I was promoted off the phones and put in charge of creating an inventory database.

Software development came to me naturally. I could code in several languages intuitively, and I excelled.

I wasn't just surviving anymore. I was building.
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Chasing Success
Looking for new challenges, I moved on from the enterprise world and spent the next several years working with startups. I held multiple roles as a software professional and made a name for myself in software architecture.

I blogged and spoke about coding, design, data, and APIs. I was awarded Microsoft MVP three years in a row, and a bigger dream to be an entrepreneur grew inside me.

In 2009, I started my first software business with two friends. We gained traction, but eventually went our separate ways. That failure pushed me forward.

In 2011, I founded Royal Jay and built its first SaaS platform, WebWaitr. To fund the growth of my SaaS dream, I began developing software and consulting for other startups. The dev shop took off. I became the guy people came to when they had an idea and needed help turning it into a fully operational product.

In 2013, Royal Jay landed a disruptive healthcare startup as a key client. Over seven years, I assembled a talented engineering team and led the architecture of a platform that now connects millions of healthcare providers and handles billions of transactions each year.

At that point, my business took off. New clients. Big contracts. Success became the norm.

I should've been happy.

Instead, there was an insatiable desire for more.
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The Unraveling
The growth gave me a sense of importance and inflated my ego, further fueling my addiction. In the startup world, alcohol is everywhere: lunch beers with the engineering team, happy hours with clients, tech meetups, and bourbon-of-the-month clubs. I even met new candidates for a beer before extending an offer.

It sounds crazy now, but it was normal then.

I increasingly felt overwhelmed by the pressure of running multi-million-dollar businesses. The kind of weight that makes you want to pull the covers over your head and not get out of bed.

My personal life began to fall apart, and alcohol became my refuge.

That's where growth began to taper off. I delegated everything I liked about being a creator and loaded myself with responsibilities that drained me. I pulled further away from my genius.

I joined masterminds and entrepreneur events, thinking they'd solve my problems, but I quickly realized how misaligned I felt in those spaces. I believed more success would fill the hole inside me. I just needed a better idea.

So I pivoted. I built new products. I launched new brands.

Nothing worked.
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Journey to Self-Awareness
I started to wonder why I was doing any of this. What was this entrepreneurial journey all about?

Most entrepreneurs glaze over this question with the familiar, “We want to make a lasting impact. We want to change the world,” without stopping to ask themselves whether they’re building from ego or alignment.

I did the same.

What I hadn’t stopped to ask myself was whether the work was actually fulfilling me, or quietly masking a deeper longing.

I went searching for answers. I spent a small fortune on coaches, therapists, and deep self-inquiry. At first, I believed my discontent was a systems problem. And to a point, it was.

But something deeper was underneath it all.

Through a year-long ontological coaching program and psychedelic therapy, I began to see what was actually driving me. I realized I had been living in a constant state of survival, shaped by unresolved pain from my past.

Beneath it all, I was still trying to prove myself. Still terrified of failure.

As I began healing the fractured pieces of me from childhood, my awareness shifted. I found a way to comfort the scared seven-year-old and reassure the sixteen-year-old that he was safe.

Psychedelic therapy opened a window into my subconscious, allowing me to process the memories and trauma shaping my behavior. Ontology gave me the language and structure to understand how I perceived, reacted to, and moved through the world.

As I reset thinking patterns that no longer served me, the muted palette of my life filled with color again.

Integration
Healing, I learned, isn't a finish line you cross or a summit you conquer. There's no final arrival, only a deeper capacity to be with what is.

No amount of therapy or profound experience removes the rawness of being human. What changes is your relationship to that rawness.

For me, that meant no longer seeing discomfort as something to avoid or fix. I learned to hold it, breathe with it, and understand it.

Letting go didn’t happen all at once. It happened quietly.

Through forgiveness. Through attention. Through choosing to meet life as it is, instead of how I thought it should have been.

That shift brought compassion for the people who came before me, and for the long chain of lives and choices that made mine possible at all.

It also opened the door to something more ordinary, and more meaningful: gratitude.

Not the performative kind. The kind you feel when you wake up and realize you’re here.
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Being Enough
For a long time, I thought growth meant fixing myself.

More discipline, more insight, more effort. Less weakness, less rest.

I lived as if peace were something you earned after enough output. As if safety arrived only once you'd proven your worth. As if rest was a reward, not a requirement.

What I eventually came to understand was much simpler, and much harder to live:

I don't have to earn being enough.

For most of my life, I believed the opposite. Effort came before peace. Output came before safety. Rest came last, if at all.

That pattern made sense once. It helped me survive. It helped me build. But over time, it became a quiet form of self-punishment.

Letting go of it didn't mean giving up responsibility. It meant releasing the belief that responsibility had to come with judgment.

I could take ownership of my life without treating it like a sentence. I could stop living as if I were still trying to prove I deserved to be here.

Living in the Present
One of the greatest gifts of that shift was the ability to face life without needing to numb it.

I used to reach for alcohol to quiet the noise and soften the edges. Now, I live with a steadiness that makes escape unnecessary.

My presence is more grounded. More loving. My wife feels it. My kids feel it. Everyone close to me feels it.

It shows up in returning to awareness. In staying grounded. In doing what needs to be done without turning it into an identity. And in loosening the grip on achievement as a proxy for worth.

From there, joy shows up quietly. Not in big wins. It never really has.

It shows up in a good meal, laughter with my kids, quiet moments with my wife, and conversations that don't need to go anywhere.

Those moments remind me that life isn't something to solve. It's something to participate in.
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Where I Stand Now
The work I’ve done internally changes how I show up externally. Not as reinvention or becoming someone new, but as settling into what was already there.

My decisions are less reactive and more intentional. My ambition doesn’t disappear, but it softens around the edges. I care more about how things are built, not just whether they work. I notice how easily intensity can masquerade as clarity, and how often slowing down leads to better outcomes.

I don’t step away from building or leading. I step into them differently.

Today, that shows up most clearly in the work I’m doing at Virayo. I am building and leading a company focused on how modern AI discovery works, and how systems can be designed to reduce noise rather than add to it.

The work is technical, strategic, and creative. It is also relational and human. It requires clarity, patience, and a willingness to make tradeoffs instead of chasing everything at once. In many ways, it is where all of this gets practiced.

What is present now is an integration of the things that have always mattered to me: problem-solving, technology, creativity, leadership, and a deeper understanding of human behavior. Not as separate pursuits, but as parts of the same whole.

I am still drawn to people who build. To those who dream big, take risks, and carry responsibility. Especially those who find themselves isolated at the edges of success, unsure why things feel heavier than they expected.

I don’t believe anyone needs to be fixed. I don’t believe there is a final arrival point.

I believe in clarity. In presence. In honest reflection. In building things that don't require you to abandon yourself in the process.

That's how I live now. That's how I work. And that's the context behind everything else on this site.
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