Austin, Texas

LeRoy Nellis

Photographed. Acted. Locked people out of their own buildings, then locked whole companies out of bad decisions. Wrote about what I found. Now building the machines that do the work.

Where I came from

My father is also named LeRoy Nellis. He worked in Travis County and he was a CPA — which is a particular kind of inheritance: not money, but a habit of checking the paperwork and not believing a number until you have seen where it came from. I am sometimes written as LeRoy Nellis II, and I have spent a career building a record that stands on its own rather than borrowing one.

I grew up in Texas. What I took from that was the willingness to walk into a room where nobody expects you and figure out how the thing actually works.

What I have actually done

• By twenty-five — millionaire
  A first patent, several properties, and a licence as a broker. Then a network engineer and a Western Regional Manager — infrastructure, systems, and how information flows and fails — and service with the ADESA SWAT team, brought in when performance mattered and failure was not an option. I did not inherit success. I built it.
• American Playboy
  Yes ladies… I’ve had a lot of fun… lol
• Actor
  On camera, which teaches you that a take you did not like may still be the one that gets used.
• Owner, Protector Inc.
  Ran a business that put people on one side of a problem and the other side on the other. I know what it costs to be the one who answers the phone at 3am.
• Lockout specialist
  Locks, and the judgement that goes with them — a locked door is a situation with a person in it, and you only get one chance to read it right.
• Fortune 500, automotive
  Inside a company where a decision moves thousands of tonnes of metal. That taught me what "accountable" means when the invoice is nine figures.
• Author & investigative writer
  Detention systems, surveillance infrastructure, and civil-rights conditions — documented and analysed rather than asserted. Most of that work lives on leroynellis.blog.

What I am building now

There is a through-line and it is not "content". It is automation applied to work that is normally done by hand, at a cost that makes it repeatable instead of bespoke.

The video line, vdedit.com, exists because multi-camera interviews were being cut by hand one at a time, and the bottleneck was never the recording — it was the editor. Turning that into a pipeline takes the editing out of the loop and puts a measured, checkable result where a person's judgement used to be.

Alongside it: aipricedesk.com, a market in AI capacity; and a book about the book business. The through-line stays the same. Take work that is done slowly and expensively, and make it fast, cheap and verifiable.

Still beating the odds.