This page serves as a place holder and as a way to track some of my online activities. For the concise version, see the main page. For a professional bio, see Jordan Mendler's Professional Biography at The Veloz Group
My main project at the moment is building Beverly Hills Chairs into the leading retailer of Herman Miller Aeron and Herman Miller Mirra chairs. I am also about to launch The Veloz Group, a conglomerate and incubator that will bring inventions and products to market, launch seeveral technology startup companies, put together a variety of financial deals, and otherwise build teams to run with innovative ideas. I am also an instructor at UCLA Extension, where I have been teaching for the last couple years.
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and went to Bridges Academy for high school where I skipped 9th grade and was fortunate enough to work as their Network Administrator. In 10th grade I also started attending Valley College which allowed me to take college classes while finishing my high school diploma. This was a great experience, and made me a big supporter of the community college system despite how bad California's education system is in every other regard. At age 18, I transfered to UCLA as a Junior, where I spent 4 years studying Physiological Pyschology and Neuroscience. After college I considered going into Psychiatry, but instead opted to work as a Programmer/Analyst in the UCLA Human Genetics Department, where I started working in my senior year while working as Systems Administrator at Ctrl and a contractor to the Laboratory of Neuroimaging. Most of my employment at UCLA revolved around Systems Architecture and Software Engineering related to High Performance and Scientific Computing. During that time I also began taking classes part-time in UCLA's Computer Science department and teaching Linux, cloud and cluster computing at UCLA Extension. After a few years in the Genetics department I decided to work at Cornerstone on Demand where I was the #2 engineering on CyberU. CyberU was an interesting project, but the corporate culture simply was not for me. I was also on the verge of starting a Masters at UCLA and growing the office chair business. I opted to leave after about 7 months, and focused on my masters part-time and the chair business close to full-time.
As a kid I was always very inquisitive and loved to take things apart and dabble with everything. This is what naturally led me into the sciences and engineering. My dad, however, was a lawyer that probably should have been a businessman instead which is what built my apetite for business from a very early age. I always loved cars and when I was 15, in anticipation of getting a car the next year, I began looking into all kinds of performance parts to turn a regular car into something resembling a race car. Shocked by how expensive everything was (especially in 15 year old kid dollars), I wondered if there was a cheaper way. I came up with the idea of trying to buy parts directly from the manufacturers, and in the process learned that it was amazingly easy to start a business and obtain a reseller license to buy wholesale -- something the US actually did right. I began thinking about how if I bought 20 items and sold 19 of them I could essentially get my own for free. At age 15 I launched JDM Enterprises and began selling automotive parts. Throughout the years I continued several random businesses and eventually got involved with a grad student at the UCLA Human Genetics lab that had come up with the idea of streaming videos to cellular phones, long before Youtube or any other sites had even considered going mobile. I saw the opportunity and became his Director of Operations, where I handled most of the Systems Administration work and dealt with scalability issues and supporting new, cutting edge features, as the site was grew by the day in a mostly undeveloped and undefined market. YouTube and others eventually copied our product, and while TinyTube did not really go anywhere financially, it was a great learning experience.
That's about all I feel like writing for now, so the rest is more concise. If you want to hear more of my many stories, you are welcome to buy me a beer or a cigar one evening.
Some of my hobbies and interests:
For the stalkers, some of my online activites:
For potential clients, some of my current projects include:
For the nerds, some of my past open-source projects (not counting all the random patches here and there):
Some of my past closed-source projects (which contribute open-source patches upstream) include:
Miscellaneous public documents: