He founded Banjo in 2010, which evolved into a public safety AI event detection service, gaining significant contracts until his past involvement with white supremacist groups during his youth was revealed in 2020, leading to his resignation as CEO.
Despite the difficulties at home, Patton was initially an A student and enjoyed showing a creative sense of style, taking fashion cues from celebrities during his early school years.
[5] Patton told Inc. that he got his degree from University of North Carolina at Greensboro's Bryant School of Business in three years while working for NASCAR, graduating magna cum laude.
[1] After participating in hackathons in 2010 and 2011, Patton founded Banjo, then called Peer Compass, a company that created an "event-detection engine" which organizes geolocated public posts from various social media platforms.
He developed software capable of performing over two quadrillion calculations per minute, monitoring a virtual grid of over 35 billion squares, each about the size of a football field, to detect anomalies in social media posts.
[1] By 2014 Banjo had pivoted to AI event detection of surveillance video for public safety, gaining a $20 million contract for the State of Utah in 2019 and attention from privacy advocates.
[3] Fleeing an abusive home, Patton lived on the streets of Los Angeles and became involved with white supremacist groups as a teen, including the KKK and Aryan Nations.
[2][9][20] "Damien’s story is a reminder how virtually anyone – particularly young people – can be swept up into a hate movement given the right conditions and circumstances," Greenblatt wrote, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the potential for personal growth and atonement.