Abandoned At Dumpster As Newborn, Florida Entrepreneur Worth $62M

PARKLAND, FL — Who knows how life might have turned out for Freddie Figgers, a 30-year-old Florida entrepreneur whose company is now worth $62.3 million, if he hadn’t been thrown away like yesterday’s trash moments after he took his first breath?

Children who are neither wanted nor loved have a rough start in life that can haunt them forever. But, after hearing the story of the newborn's cruel beginnings, Nathan and Betty Figgers of Quincy, Florida, knew they wanted him. They knew they would love him. They took him in as a foster child when he was only two days old and formally adopted him 13 days later.

He loved the parents who chose him back, so much so that of all the things Figgers has invented — for example, the Figgers F1 cell phone, the first to go into airplane mode and to prevent texting while driving, and the network service to support it — what gives him the most pride is a shoe he designed for his dad, who was living with Alzheimer’s disease.

The disease had progressed to the point that his dad would forget to put on his pants but never his shoes. So he created a two-way GPS device to fit into his father’s shoe.

“I would say, ‘Hey, Dad, talk into your shoe,’ and it would instantly notify me of his location,” Figgers, who now lives in Parkland, Florida, said in a YouTube video chronicling his meteoric rise in the telecommunications industry.

Freddie Figgers’ life story — from the moment the newborn was abandoned near a dumpster in the Florida panhandle to his founding of Figgers Wireless, the largest African American-owned telecommunications firm in the country — is a love story. It’s a story of a boy’s love for his parents and theirs for him, certainly, but also of the love of learning, of creating and of inspiring a new generation of entrepreneurs.

“Believe in what you do,” he said in the YouTube video of the advice he gives young people. “Don’t let anyone talk down to you. People would not see your vision, people would not believe in you, but believe in yourself and keep thriving.”

Figgers speaks from the experience of a kid who was talked down to plenty. Quincy is a small community, and everyone knew he had been abandoned as an infant. Kids in his elementary school called him “dumpster baby,” Figgers told The Washington Post.

“It's a rural area, so after it happened, everybody heard about it,” he said. “My parents told me the truth about what happened as I grew older. I thought about it a lot as a kid, and I'd have to say it was embarrassing when I was younger.”

But he persevered.

Figgers got his first computer when he was 9. It wasn’t much. His parents couldn’t afford anything new or even gently used, so they went to a Goodwill store and, for $25, picked up a used Macintosh manufactured in 1989, the same year Freddie was born. It didn’t work. Freddie fixed it.

“I tinkered around with it for a few weeks and ended up taking parts off of a radio and sorting them into the computer board,” Figgers told the Los Angeles Sentinel in 2017. “I got it back to working, and I currently have that computer today.”

Within three years, he was a self-taught but, nevertheless, bona fide computer technician, making the kind of money for a single job that a hundred kids couldn’t collectively earn in a year carrying newspapers. Instead of making sure newspapers landed in the right spot on a subscriber’s doorstep, his after-school job was repairing computers for the city of Quincy.

That’s when Figgers had the vision that turned him into a multimillionaire. He was captivated by the intricate mapping system behind the city’s internet, telephone and cable television service, but was daunted by it, too.

“I loved the different call routes and how you could build a mapping system to make a call from Los Angeles go to New York,” Figgers told the Sentinel. “So, I wanted to build my own communications network. But when I saw the infrastructure cost, I thought, ‘God, I’m never going to be able to do this.’ ”

But he did. It was a challenge, rather than an outcome.

In another three years, when he was 15, a tornado hit a car dealership in Alabama, destroying all its customer information. So he got the idea to create a cloud computing service that allowed the dealership to store the information on a server in his back yard.

He decided to skip college and took a job building a computer program, a task that took him four weeks and put $80,000 in his bank account. Those earnings, along with the $2.2 million from the sale of the technology for his dad’s shoe device to a Kansas company , allowed him to start Figgers Communications.

The main business of Figgers Wireless is to sell smartphones and data plans, but his passion is developing technology that benefits health care and safety. For example, he developed a wireless blood glucose meter that uses Bluetooth technology. He also is working on a project using the same technology he developed for his father’s shoe that will allow people to keep track of family members who are homeless.

“That could be me on the streets — I could have been homeless or dead if I hadn’t been found by the dumpster after I was born,” he told The Post.

Figgers also used his fortune to establish the charitable Figgers Foundation, which helps teachers buy classroom supplies, supports youth programs, provides natural disaster aid, funds scholarships for high school students, helps senior citizens pay their bills and supports other causes.

“The best thing any human being can do is influence another one,” he told The Post.

Figgers never met his biological mother, although he learned she was a prostitute and a drug addict. He has no desire to meet her.

Everything he is, he said, is a credit to the parents who adopted him, loved him, supported him and encouraged him. “They taught me not to let my circumstances define who I was,” he told The Post.

“My parents adopted me and gave me love and a future,” he said. “They did their best to make the world a better place, and now that’s all I want to do, too.”

Figgers is married to Natlie Figgers, an attorney. They have a 2-year-old-daughter, Rose.

“I’m at a happy place in my life — it’s important to me to pay it forward,” he told The Post. “I’m just one person; but I believe that if I can have an impact on even one other person, it can multiply. I want my daughter to grow up knowing that."