May 24 (edited) • Introductions
Why I Started This? And Why You're Here.
As our Skool community continues to grow close to 50 members, I want to take a moment to reintroduce myself—especially if we haven’t crossed paths before.
My name is Abdoul Aziz Kouraogo. I was born and raised in Burkina Faso. At 23, I moved to the United States with big dreams and no clear roadmap. Like many immigrants, my early days were filled with hard work and humble beginnings. I worked as a bus boy, a server, and drove Uber—doing whatever it took to stay afloat while trying to find my way.
While I was still in university back home, I watched the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, and it planted a seed. The idea of becoming a trader felt so distant, yet exciting. One day, during a conversation with a friend living in the U.S., he told me something that changed my perspective: “You know you can become one if you really want to.” That one sentence lit a fire in me; motivated me to travel across the world and settle in America.
In 2015, I went back to school and earned another degree in Economics, worked for a boutique Investment firm as an analyst, later on got licensed in life insurance with one of the top 3 Insurance Companies in the US, passed the Series 7 and 63 exams, and became a stockbroker with the Number 1 Online Broker and Trading Company. I had made the dream real—but over time, I realized something important: the work didn’t fulfill me. I wanted more than a career in trading. I wanted growth, freedom, purpose.
As I was considering going back to school for a master’s in data, another life-changing conversation happened. A different friend told me about cloud computing. He was making over $220,000 a year, working from home, and had transitioned into tech in under a year—no degree required. That absolutely blew my mind.
From that day on, everything changed.
I joined a bootcamp and started diving deeper in to Cloud. I eventually quit my job 6 months later and gave myself fully to this new path. For 3 months, I treated studying like a full-time job. Eight hours a day of deep focus, followed by four hours of structured classes at night. I knocked on doors—literally—asking people in tech if I could visit them, watch them work, ask questions, and understand what it really looked like to be in a cloud role. I didn’t want theory. I wanted the real world.
Nine months after I started as a newbie in cloud, I landed three job offers totaling more than $450,000 in compensation.
Since then, I’ve worked as a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Indeed, a Senior Cloud Engineer at Slalom Consulting, and a Senior DevOps Engineer at a fintech company in Omaha. I pushed myself hard—sometimes too hard. Eventually, I reached a point of burnout and made the difficult but necessary decision to take a year off to rediscover myself and travel.
That time away gave me something I hadn’t realized I needed: perspective.
Today, I continue to share what I’ve learned through writing and coaching. I’m passionate about helping others break into tech—not by chasing jobs blindly, but by building clarity, confidence, and the kind of presence that attracts the right opportunities.
I started this community to share a platform and explore real-world insights, proven frameworks, and mindset shifts that help people launch and grow meaningful tech careers. I write about cloud security, architecture, DevSecOps, leadership, and career transformation—because working in tech has genuinely changed my life. It gave me options. It gave me hope. And it showed me what’s possible when you bet on yourself with everything you’ve got.
If you're on a similar path or standing at a crossroads, I hope my story reminds you that your background does not define your future—your decisions do. And sometimes, all it takes is one conversation to change your entire direction.
Stay close, because I’m bringing in some of the most brilliant minds across all cloud specialties—people who’ve landed multiple six-figure roles and are building inspiring careers. They’ll be joining us to share what’s really happening behind closed doors, the daily challenges they face, and the exact insights I used to go knocking on doors for.
You won’t want to miss what’s coming next!
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Why I Started This? And Why You're Here.
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