There are 3 people who I wouldn’t necessarily call “mentors” but fit the bill because they are influential older people whom I admire and have changed the course of my life for the better. They are my college professor, my Dad’s childhood friend, and Mitch Altman.

I am not alone when I call him a mentor. He may not like the term, but he has inspired so people I would be very surprised if more than a few would call him such. As he likes to say “I convince a lot of people to quit their job.”

I first met Mitch at Noisebridge, a hackerspace in San Francisco. I had moved to San Francisco and I had lived through the dotcom boom of 2000, but missed it all as I decided to finish out my degree instead of jump on more than a few chances I had to join this or that startup. I finally left in 2008 at the end of a messy divorce, a recession, and a total disillusionment of basically everything I had strived for in my adolescent and then young adult life. A year later, Noisebridge was formed; I had missed the start of the Maker movement as well.

I came back in 2014 and one night I went Noisebridge, a place I had heard a lot about and really wanted to check out. Mitch did some kind of presentation or something – I can’t really remember – but he talked about how he had been going to China with a group of people doing what he called a Hacker Trip To China. He announced that anyone was free to join. So I did. I went to China in 2015 for the Hacker Trip To China. It was a life-changing event. It was a great adventure and I went again in 2018 and moved to China in 2019.

Mitch (here I link to his Wikipedia page because he is too humble to talk about himself on his own web page) is a catalyst for positive change. He has been written up as the Godfather of Makers because he is an early founder, an active advocate, and has a clear vision of what a hackerspace should be. I like to think of him more as the Johnny Appleseed rather than a Godfather because hackerspaces just seem to sprout from the ground shortly after he shows up and gives a talk.

Be excellent to each other

-Bill, Ted, Mitch and the founders of Noisebridge

There is much more to say about this enigmatic person, but I will end by telling you the ultimate Mitch-ism that sums up his attitude and vision, a line borrowed from a 1989 movie: “Be excellent to each other.”