By David Benda, Record Searchlight, September 2013

Among the innovators on display at Friday’s annual Game Changers event in Redding will be Faye Hall, a technical whiz whose roots can be traced to the early days of wireless phones.

Hall, who moved to Redding from Santa Cruz about a year ago, has started Build It, a company that next year will offer adults monthly classes in computer coding and programming.

“We want to be a part of the community,” said Hall, who was born in China and spent time in the mid-1990s in the Kansas City, Mo., area as a senior engineer working on the Sprint wireless phone network. She also worked as a network engineer
at eBay during its early days. “We are not here to replace Shasta College; we are not here to replace the other schools.”

In fact, Hall, whose husband, David, is partnering with her on Build It, envisions partnering with Shasta College’s Economic Workforce Development Program.

Game Changers is hosted by the Economic Development Corp. of Shasta County and will take place inside the Redding Civic Auditorium.

The event will feature 20 innovative North State companies and keynote speaker Peter Barth of The Iron Yard in Greenville, S.C. The Iron Yard has two business accelerators and an academy that teaches adults programming and coding.

When Ben Parr, former editor of Mashable.com, spoke in Redding in August, he said every school in the country should be teaching its students coding and programming because those are the jobs of the future.

“When you know programming, you immediately double your rate of pay,” said Hall, who has a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Kansas. “Jobs in the tech field don’t require a Ph.D.”

Learning coding and programming “opens the door to entrepreneurship,” he added.

Classes through Build It will be offered in monthly installments. The training will take three to four months to complete. Hall said tuition will cost $1,200 a month. Build It recently moved in to its new home at 925 Merchant St., where it
will host an open house 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.

Dr. Tim Linnet, who co-founded Linnet Corp. in Redding in 2010, sits on the Game Changers organizing community. He believes the event is an exciting way for people to find out more about the North State’s innovative spirit.

“You see different areas other than Silicon Valley where the populations have these startup communities and I really think that is where Redding is headed,” Linnet said.

Linnet graduated from Foothill High School in 2004 and went to the University of Pacific where he earned his doctorate in pharmacy before returning home to start Linnet.

Last year the company launched Rutaesomn, which it bills as the world’s first sleep aid that removes caffeine before going to bed. There is a patent pending on the product.

Linnet Corp. also launched the website wedreamcenter.com, which Linnet says is a medium to foster entrepreneurship and help startup companies.

“I went through the startup phase and there was not a lot of help and advisors to help dig and find the resources,” Linnet said.