While home life was good for Freddie, school was a different matter.  Kids called Freddie “dumpster baby” and “trash can boy”.  The children’s cruelty caused Freddie to spend a lot of time alone.  When he was 9 years old, he negotiated with the clerk at Goodwill and brought home a non-functioning Mac for $24.  With parts robbed from his dad’s alarm clock, plus a lot of trial and error, Freddie soldered together a functioning computer.  This was the beginning of a dream.

A few years later, when a tornado ripped through Dothan, Alabama, destroying a car dealership’s customer files, Freddie saw the need for backing up data.  He created his first cloud computing service. The remote servers resided in Freddie’s back yard. He was 15. 

Strongly impacted by his parents’ acts of kindness and his own desire to solve problems, Freddie turned his passion into solutions.  

Freddie’s father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, inspired his son’s first invention. There were times in the middle of the night when Nathan would walk away from home,  Freddie recalled. Sometimes his dad forgot to put on his pants, but he never forgot his shoes. To help find his dad when he wandered off, Freddie embedded a tracker and a two-way communicator into his father’s shoes.  Freddie was 17 when he invented the shoe tracker. He later sold it for $2.2million.  

Similarly, influenced by his mother’s uncle who died alone, of a diabetic coma, Freddie developed the glucometer which instantly shares a diabetic’s glucose reading with a relative and a health care provider. Bettie is particularly proud of this invention.

Being from a town with a population of 7,300, Freddie recognized that rural communities were unlikely to ever be properly served by the large telecommunications companies. He could see how this held back people because they were still on a dial-up service. So Freddie petitioned the FCC for license to cover rural areas.  At 21 Freddie became the youngest person ever to be granted an FCC license for a telecommunications company.  Figgers Communications is now worth over $62million and is the only minority owned telecommunications company in the US.

20% of Figgers Communication’s net profits support the The Figgers Foundation which funds dozens of charities. Surely Nathan and Bettie’s gift of life to one tiny baby boy is paying dividends for millions.