David Collinsworth

I was born and raised in Chandler, Arizona, back when there were around 30,000 people living there, and probably just as many cows. Today, it’s a modern city with a population of around 275,000 people. For the first five years of my life, my family lived in a mobile home literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Shortly after that, my parents started their own house-painting business and worked tirelessly to pull our family up into the middle class. Growing up, my three siblings and I had the chance to see firsthand how hard work and small business ownership could make the American dream a reality.

There are many paths to the middle class and beyond, but the one my parents chose taught me an invaluable lesson: you can create something from nothing. It’s a simple truth about life that has stayed with me all these years and one I put to work in my own life in 2010.

After many years in restaurant management and construction, I went back to school. Two years later, I was nearing the end of two simultaneous associate degrees (120 credits in 2.5 years) when I had my first big idea—something that didn’t exist yet. The details aren’t important (if you ask nicely, I might show you the prototypes), but what’s important are the lessons I learned along the way.

Taking that product from idea to reality, through multiple prototypes I built myself (one of my degrees is in fabrication, the other in science), to writing a patent application (because I couldn’t afford a patent attorney), to pitching the idea to major manufacturers you’d recognize, was an epic journey. At the time, it felt like the culmination of something enormous, but looking back, I realize it was only the beginning of a vastly bigger journey—one I’m still on, and one I don’t expect will end until my time here is done.

So what did I learn? I learned that if I was willing to climb over every barrier in my way, I could do something big; I could turn an idea into something real. I also learned that pushing myself to my limits—and ultimately failing to get the outcome I desired—wouldn’t kill me. The disappointment wouldn’t break me. In fact, because I learned so much during that process, and because I honored that spark of creativity within me, I started to have bigger and more frequent ideas.

That process—having a big idea, struggling to make it a reality, and learning from my failures—repeated itself multiple times over the last decade. It’s been brutal at times, but it’s also completely altered the trajectory of my life.

Now, you might be thinking, “Plenty of people have tried to start a business. That’s not so special.” And you’d be right—millions of people have. But let me be clear: I wasn’t trying to start an Etsy shop, or launch a drop-shipping store, or flip sneakers on eBay. Those are valid (and often profitable) endeavors, but they weren’t my path.

The least ambitious project I’ve worked on since 2008 was designing, fabricating, and patenting a revolutionary plumbing fixture—and then attempting to get the biggest manufacturers in the world to bid against each other for ownership of the Intellectual Property (IP). Fewer than 2% of Americans have ever attempted something like that.

After that, I spent a year collaborating with a team of developers on a rival to Zillow that leveraged advanced machine learning in an entirely new way—a way that, to this day, still hasn’t been done. Fewer than 0.02% of Americans have ever founded a cutting-edge tech company.

When that chapter closed, I built a business around a completely new way of preserving family legacy—a system designed to connect generations in ways no technology or service has ever attempted before.

Each of these projects pushed me beyond my limits—mentally, emotionally, and financially. I’ve faced obstacles that felt insurmountable, but I’ve climbed over every single one of them. Through these ventures, I’ve gained an extraordinarily wide and deep set of skills and knowledge—the kind that only comes from relentless perseverance through high-stakes challenges.

And because none of these big ideas resulted in massive success (yet), they’ve also kept me fiercely driven. I’m not someone who gives up; I’m someone who learns, grows, and tries again—each time with more wisdom, more resilience, and an even bigger vision for what’s possible.

I’m not just here to make a living—I’m here to make a dent in the universe.

You might think that pushing yourself to the edge physically, mentally, and emotionally for over a decade would eventually break you, but it’s had the opposite effect on me. Over the past ten years, I’ve put in over 10,000 hours of relentless entrepreneurial grind—all while running my remodeling business full-time. Through that process, I’ve become unbreakable.

It’s that mindset, combined with my wide-ranging knowledge and interests, that finally collided with a new passion in 2015: politics.

Like many Americans, I was not a fan of talking about politics. It always felt like a circular conversation with no clear answers. For someone like me, who is constantly solving problems, talking about politics felt like the definition of insanity. Why talk about something when it makes no difference? Why bother learning about policy when there’s no real mechanism to influence it without writing big checks to politicians?

In 2016, my frustration turned into deep concern, and then into my most profound idea yet: a completely new approach to politics. An idea that would give real legislative power to The People—without violence, without requiring permission from those already in power, and without needing to rewrite the Constitution.

That idea became Stakeholders Voice.

I hope this doesn’t come across as peacocking. My goal isn’t for you to envy me—it’s for you to really see me. I started from humble beginnings and climbed my way up. I’ve faced failures and learned from them. I’ve poured every ounce of my passion into building something that can genuinely change the world for the better.

I hope your journey to meaning and impact is faster and less painful than mine has been. But even if it isn’t, I hope you’ll find the strength to keep going, to keep growing, and to never stop trying to become the best version of yourself.

And if any part of my story resonates with you, I hope you’ll join me.

Together, we can create something extraordinary.

Grateful for You,

David Collinsworth

dave@divergentdoer.com