How I got here

In my own words

2008–2024Austin

At 13, I was sleeping on a couch in a converted garage.

That year my family lost nearly everything, and I sank into a depression that lasted a year and a half.

This is how I got from that couch to founding my company, Crawft.

Life was easy until I was 13

I was born in Austin and grew up in a three-story condo downtown, near Rainey Street. My dad owned a business that brought in about a quarter of a million dollars a year. I never thought about money.

I was a fearless, restless kid. At seven I colored chopsticks, wrapped them in yarn and beads, and walked the Lady Bird Lake trail asking strangers, “Will you buy my magic wand?” Enough of them said yes to keep me in candy.

Then, the year I turned 13, all of it fell apart. It started with my father.

Cruce at 12, laughing in a lake in a red and black life jacket, holding on to the edge of an inflatable float. — Me at 12, a year before everything changed.

My father started hearing voices

It had been building for a while. My father heard voices he called “the three masters,” and they told him he had been chosen. To most people he seemed normal: charismatic, still running his business. Then he went on a retreat at a commune deep in the Costa Rican jungle, a place people went to take hallucinogens. Afterward, the voices told him he had become a god.

About a year later, right around when I turned 13, they told him to move to that commune for good, and he planned to take my little brother and me with him. For my mom, that was the final straw. She filed for divorce and fought in court to keep us home. We had evidence, but the court decided my father was mentally fine and gave him partial custody. My mom managed to keep my brother, who was eight, at home. I had to spend that summer with my father at the commune: makeshift houses in the middle of nowhere, no Wi-Fi.

My mom flew for three days to bring me home

That summer, at the commune, my father committed sexual crimes. I called my mom and told her. She stayed up for three days straight, catching flight after flight to reach me, and brought me home to Austin.

I haven't really seen my father since. He left the country and doesn't pay the child support the court ordered. The money went with him.

I hit bottom

My mom had no money of her own. We went from the condo downtown to a converted garage under 500 square feet: my mom, my little brother, my grandma and me. I slept on the couch. We ate from food banks, dealt with bed bugs for the first time in our lives, and went into debt.

After that summer and everything we'd lost, I sank into a deep depression. I was pulled out of school and spent my days in a partial hospitalization program, talking with therapists and other depressed teenagers, and I was put on antidepressants. When I went back to school, I skipped every class and disappeared into screens. Nothing anyone tried made it better. It went on for about a year and a half.

I chose to fight

Then something clicked. No therapist, counselor or school was going to fix this for me, and other than my mom, no one would ever care about my life as much as I did. As I saw it, I had two options: cease to exist, or fight for my existence and build a life I could finally be free in. I chose to fight.

No one was going to save me but me.

Running came first

One of the first things I did was run. Then I started going to the gym. My body got stronger first, then my confidence, then my discipline.

Running became a daily habit, and a couple of years later it became Ippo, the Apple Watch running game I built. None of it happened in a straight line, though.

Cruce running on a track in a headband and race bib 549, other runners behind him. — A Thanksgiving Turkey Trot, 2025.

I got better in loops

I'd be disciplined for a few days, slip back into old habits, regret it and start again. That loop repeated for a long time, but each time around, the disciplined stretch lasted longer and the slip got shorter. Days became weeks, and weeks became months. Over a year or two, I became a different person: energetic, confident and disciplined.

The shape of my story so far. An illustration of how I changed, not a measurement.

I've cooked dinner most nights since I was 13

All of this happened while my family still needed me. I started cooking dinner in the garage, and I never stopped. I also handle a lot of the cleaning, laundry and yardwork, and with my father gone, I help raise my little brother, who is five and a half years younger.

My mom has a heart condition. In 2025 she had three surgeries, two of them open-heart, and I helped her through all three while keeping up with school and building a company.

A gun threat sent me looking for a way out

School was a different problem. By ninth grade I was climbing, but I was doing it at Crockett High School in South Austin, where fights broke out most days. Then a classmate threatened to shoot me and showed me photos of himself and his friends with guns.

My mom asked the district for a transfer and asked me to look up schools. Mostly for fun, I searched for any school I could want, not just the ones nearby, and found Alpha: a private school in Austin where students learn academics with AI in the mornings and build businesses in the afternoons. I called admissions myself and applied that week. Alpha gave me the first full scholarship in its history, and I walked in about two weeks after the threat.

Why I work the way I do

Everything since runs on what I learned at the bottom: if something needs to happen in my life, I'm the one who has to make it happen. I found Alpha on my own. I taught myself to build software with AI. At 16 I recruited four adult engineers and managed them while they built the first version of Ippo. Then I founded Crawft. It makes Mac software that shows companies what their teams actually work on.

I'm not finished. I still fight the same loops; I just win far more of them now.

I wish I could tell my 13-year-old self just how far I'd come. I don't think he would believe I made it out.

Cruce sitting on the grass at an Austin park in a maroon T-shirt, his face turned up and away from the camera, the downtown skyline and a cloudy sky behind him. — Austin, spring 2026.

Cruce SaundersLevel 0