Kevin Mastriano

The Beginning

Kevin Mastriano grew up in North Haven, Connecticut — bikes in the street, a Nintendo 64 in a friend's garage, and a brain that was always looking for the next thing to feel.

He hated school. Not in the “I learn differently” way people say now to soften it — he genuinely hated it. He got okay grades on purpose, so precise in his mediocrity that no teacher ever called on him. He took apart anything he could find to see how it worked. He built a Lego battleship on a six-foot folding table in his bedroom from scratch at eight years old, and then took it apart and built something else.

He also ironed his money. Whatever he managed to save, he pressed the bills flat with an iron and kept them in a careful stack. He valued them so much he wanted them to look like they meant something. Some things don't change.

The Hard Part

He was fourteen when he started selling drugs. He was sixteen when he first used opiates. By the time he walked into detox on New Year's Day, 2009, he was twenty years old and everything he owned fit in a duffel bag.

He spent four months in a sober house in Westerly, Rhode Island. Worked at a Dairy Queen. Started over with nothing, in the specific and terrifying way that actually having nothing is — not metaphorically, literally.

A few months later, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with ADHD. Explained dopamine dysregulation, prefrontal cortex underactivation, the reason opiates had felt like a key turning in a lock. Then handed him a prescription.

He didn't fill it. He filed everything else away.

The Build

He found a small company. He showed up. He was useful. He learned everything they'd teach him, and when he'd learned it all, he found an empty desk and sat down.

He became a product manager without asking. Built expertise in precision calibration equipment. Traveled. Sold. Managed. And in 2019, he took over a failing calibration business and started building Custom Calibration from scratch.

Today, Custom Calibration does approximately $1.3 million a year. He has employees who count on him. He works on the business, not just in it. He's building toward one of the largest calibration labs in the Northeast.

He is clean. He has been clean since the first minute of January 1st, 2009.

The Life

He has a wife — Rosanna, four-foot-eleven, talks constantly, best decision he ever made. Two daughters: one who overthinks everything exactly the way he does, one who is so stubborn she won't put her shoes on before school and is going to be completely unstoppable because of it.

He has a morning that starts at 5am. A spice drawer organized with a precision that most people find slightly alarming. A 3D printer he uses to build custom Tupperware organizers. An Oura Ring he monitors obsessively. A ketogenic diet, eighteen-hour fasts, a daily training protocol.

He has never been medicated. He has never been impaired. And he functions — genuinely functions — in a way he didn't think was available to him.

He is thirty-eight years old and enjoying every second of it.