Episode 2 with Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, CEO of Zivtech ADD Hero

Hey everybody, welcome to episode number two of The A.D.D. Entrepreneur.

Today I am thrilled to be joined by Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg, the Founder of Zivtech, a Philly-based digital strategy company specializing in application and product development, who also obviously happens to have ADD.

Thanks for hopping on here, Alex.

Alex: Absolutely, happy to join.

Nick: That said, again, I wanna make sure…I don’t know if you wanna add anything on to what it is you do because what we were just talking about, I feel like I definitely did not even scratch the surface on all of the cool stuff that you guys were doing at this point.

Alex: No, it’s cool, yeah.

Zivtech is a nine-year-old web development, design, training, strategy company focused on products and web applications for everything from startups to Fortune, whatever, 50 companies, and we work with all sorts of open source tools as well as software as a service, and occasionally even proprietary software to help our customers innovate in a digital sort of space.

Nick: Thank you for that, that’s obviously way more holistic way, I would say, to deliver. Yeah man, just thank you so much for coming on here. I truly appreciate you guys…it’s amazing how busy everybody is, especially founders, and just…I’m very, very honored that people are willing to take their time out, especially, you know, when we’re easily as distracted as we are.

Alex: Yeah, well, I think that that’s also the way that you’re gonna get plenty of distracted people to sign up because they’re like, ooh, that sounds distracting, I like. And it’s definitely interesting from what I’m used to doing at four o’clock on a Monday, so yeah, that sounds great.

Nick: Okay. With that said, I guess we will just dive right in. So the first question I have for you is,

How old were you when you started displaying signs of ADD?

Alex: I think as soon as I started school.

I went to a sort of alternative school here in Philadelphia called Project Learn.

So they didn’t really have report cards, but I did see what they would do, is they would give you sort of feedback, and the feedback I always got from kindergarten on to sixth grade when I stopped going there was always some flavor of, Alex is very enthusiastic, he always seems very excited and eager to talk about what we’re gonna talk about, but he never lets anyone else have a turn and he never waits his turn, and he’s always a little loud and interrupting.

So you know, looking back on it, I don’t think people were diagnosed that early or as often with it back then. But for sure, it’s been a personality trait since day one, and it starts to…started immediately to show itself as soon as I came in contact with the world outside of my parents’ and grandparents’ houses.

Nick: So that perfectly segues into the next question which was,

Who would you say was the person who noticed, if it wasn’t your parents?

Alex: Again, I don’t think like back then in the, I guess, ’70s, ’80s, I guess mostly…no, it would have been the ’80s, I don’t think it was as well…or I don’t think it was diagnosed as often as it is today.

So, you know, I think they just thought I was eager and excited, and I was lucky enough to find myself in a school that really was supportive of people that needed to have a little more, or maybe that had a little more energy and excitement towards what they were doing, and were a little bit more all over the place.

So I think I just ended up in the right situation early on in life so that it didn’t need to be…it wasn’t an issue.