Trac Bannon: John Kaufhold is one of those super smart people... you know the ones... when you read their LinkedIn profile and do a little googling, their achievements and academic records are phenomenal. I was initially a bit shy about reaching out to talk with him.
I'm a techie. I'm not a data scientist though I'd like to think that I'm math and AI adjacent. John's contact information was shared with me by Jennifer Ives, CEO at Watering Hole AI and a Real Technologists alumni.
When I hopped on the call with John, he surprised me by being a few minutes early in hopes of meeting Bob. That's become a theme with guests... on this particular Friday evening though, it was only John and me. I was immediately drawn to John's personality. During the rest of our chat, I figured out why. Like me, John grew up in what we like to call "the rest of Pennsylvania", the part that is not metro Philly.
John grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In fact, his wife Liz, who he affectionately calls "the boss" grew up there as well. Lancaster is steeped in U. S. history and is known for its well preserved historic buildings. Lancaster is also known for its large Amish population. It has one of the oldest plan people communities in America.
John describes his upbringing as typical blue collar. His parents loved him deeply and placed an emphasis on education sacrificing to send him to a private Catholic school.
John Kaufhold: Second street. Yep. And the boss, she grew up in Schooling Hills, which is like the, you know, the nice part of town. I went to Sacred Heart school. My mom and dad. my mom was a Bell Telephone switchboard operator. And my dad, he was a radar operator in the Navy. And then he got a job as a network technician. And neither of them had a college degree. So it was kind of a big deal for them to spend that kind of money to put Mike and I in Catholic school.
Trac Bannon: His parents, especially his mother, invested not only the funds for John to attend Sacred Heart, she invested a ton of time. She made sure John and his older brother Mike were set on a solid educational path. She did all this while battling illness. When John was still in elementary school, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
John Kaufhold: What my mom did as she was dealing with 10 years of... recovering from mastectomy and chemo and just the slow process of breast cancer. She was making sure that Mike and I, we were her project... and she made sure that we got all the educational opportunities she could possibly give us. So she put us in these programs at the local college, Franklin Marshall... and we would take... like some kind of Saturday classes and it would be us, these two very blue collar kids, and then all of the rich kids in class.
