There is always a story behind what we see today.
I recently sat down with San Angelo Live founder Joe Hyde for a conversation that lasted more than two hours. We covered a lot of ground, but before getting into some of the broader topics from that conversation, I wanted to start here.
Before San Angelo LIVE!, there was a much longer story. In this first chapter, Joe shares the path that eventually brought him to San Angelo — from a 20-year career in the Air Force, to discovering the early World Wide Web, building an internet service provider in Del Rio, teaching himself the technology behind websites and servers, and making his first unexpected move into local news.
What stood out to me was how much of that journey was built around curiosity and a willingness to learn something new. This was the 1990s. The internet was still something people were trying to understand. Joe tells the story of showing the idea to someone who dismissed it as a fad — and deciding to build it anyway.
That eventually became DelRio dot com, an ISP with thousands of accounts, and later Joe's first experiment with digital local news. Years before San Angelo LIVE!, some of the ideas behind it were already taking shape.
Watch or listen to the full conversation on Youtube or Linkedin for the full story.