Alex Mountjoy was raised on a hippie farm in upstate New York where the soap was required for children but seemingly optional for adults and deodorant was wholly unnecessary product. It was there, amid the mud and goat droppings and the lonely, vast wasteland of nature (40 acres), that Alex learned what might be the most important lesson of his life. His mini-bike broke. He wept. His father said: Let’s take it apart. And so they did.

He learned then what he has never forgotten—that broken is not the same as ruined. That anything, given patience and theory and enough cursing, can be fixed. He spent his youth crawling beneath cars, hammering on hulls, sanding old paint off wrecks and watching boats die slow deaths in the shipyard. He studied physics in college, mostly because it sounded harder than it was, and took that degree to Paris, where he pretended to understand French and worked as a stagiaire in a biophysics lab porting a Fortran program running on a mini-computer to an exciting new platform—the Personal Computer, or PC. Alex became a programmer.

Alex launched his first company in 1995—Dolce Mia, which made high-design decoupage decorative picture frames.

Then, in 2016 he founded Mountjoy Enterprises and launched a cannabis-infused sparkling water, which made headlines boasted rapidly increasing sales. It was the right idea, at the right time. But legalization eventually killed the cannabis business in California. So he pivoted. To CBD. Same water, no THC. Mountjoy Sparkling CBD was an innovative product which achieved immediate commercial success. On the West Coast, where he lived and sold, this inventive and successful drink was taxed and regulated into a footnote.

So now Mountjoy co-packs cold coffee drinks in a quiet factory that hums like a monastic vow. It is a business, not a dream, and it pays the bills most months. But the money isn’t what it was, and Alex—at an age when other men stare longingly at sailboats—went out and got himself a job fixing electric motors. Because, again, broken is not the same as ruined.

He'd returned to programming briefly during COVID, writing software for medical devices, thinking hard about human behavior and why people won’t upload their medical records but will gleefully share their dog’s DNA. He got laid off anyway. Replaced by an “AI guy” who was, presumably, less opinionated and didn’t need health insurance.

It was in the aftermath of that layoff, with the job market shriveled and the tech world contracting like an old lung, that the idea for BuildShift emerged. He saw displaced technologists everywhere—smart, capable people pushed out of their industry by a hype wave of artificial intelligence and corporate cowardice. He saw students finishing engineering degrees with no job in sight. And he saw, in his own factory, machines waiting for someone to automate them.

So he built BuildShift.

A place where humans—not just algorithms—get another shot. Where clever people with calluses on their hands can fix the future with actual tools. Where internships aren’t desk-bound code prisons but real-world, bolt-tightening, circuit-soldering, line-optimizing experiences. He gives them battle scars. He gives them purpose. And they give him hope.

Alex Mountjoy may not wear a tie. He may smell faintly of dielectric grease and sarcasm. But if you're wondering who can lead a new kind of tech education—one that teaches not just Python but patience, not just robotics but redemption—look no further. He's fixed everything from picture frames to power circuits, from beverage brands to broken dreams.

He built this thing. With his hands. With his stubborn, weathered, cracked-knuckle belief that things can be fixed. And if you’re thinking of donating to BuildShift, do it not for him—but for the people he’s lifting off the floor and back into the world.

Because nobody else is coming.
And because this thing he’s building?
It works.