Chris Brogan inspired a great meme this morning: writing a short backstory or biography about yourself. I think this is a great idea for the 99.999% of us who aren’t tech celebrities.
In the summer of 1977 my parents moved our family from Chicago to Denver. I was about to turn thirteen and it was the perfect excuse for me to indulge in that stereotypical adolescent “Why does the world hate meeee?!?!?!” tantrum. I guess I made things miserable enough around the new house that one of the new neighbor lady’s took pity on my mom and offered to take me to work with her one day.
I don’t remember what she did for a living, something medical/scientific, but in the corner of their lab was this machine with a tv screen and a keyboard. My neighbor asked me if I wanted to see it. She turned it on, we waited for a couple of long minutes (yeah, some things never change) and then she typed on it, selecting something called G)ames from what I would later learn was called a “menu”. She sat me down in front of the keyboard and I read the following on the screen:
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.
Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully.
⟩_
By the end of the day I had a small crowd of people behind me watching me wend my way through the Colossal Cave, going farther in one afternoon than anyone else had gotten in weeks of playing. That magical afternoon is when I first knew that these incredible machines called computers were made for me to tinker with.
I spent the rest of my teens and twenties totally absorbed in the Golden Age of Geekdom: Dungeons & Dragons, science fiction/fantasy books, programming, hardware hacking, computer games, phone phreaking, rebelling against all authority, etc. It wasn’t all roses though, the 70s-80s was a hellish time to be a young computer geek/nerd. You were pretty much doomed to be poor, misunderstood and written off by society at large, especially - it seemed at the time - the female part.
After drifting through any number of what we call McJobs today, I decided that earning money would actually let me buy more toys, and that conning people into letting me play with computers was just the ticket. I worked my way through several programming jobs, making lots of mistakes and learning over the shoulders of older/wiser mentors.
In the early 90s I was working at a programming job with Peter Girard, a fellow computer geek/nerd. He turned me on to this kind of super-BBS called “Internet”. A year and a half later some really smart folks NCSA pushed the idea of hyperlinking hypertext documents over the tipping point by releasing an application called Mosaic.
I also got married to my beautiful, wonderful wife Patti and then Pete married Michele a few years later. We’ve all remained close friends through the years - he’s my eldest daughter’s godfather and I was his best man. Along the way, we continued to explore the possibilities of this cool new thing called The Web, and while at ProCard, a small software company in the credit card industry, we wrote what is widely believed to be the first online credit card system that allowed employees to log on and review their corporate card transactions.
A couple of visionaries at TSYS, one of the worlds biggest credit card processors, saw our online application and approached me with a job offer be a part of a newly forming Electronic Commerce team. The only catch was that we’d need to relocate from Denver to Columbus, GA. My role would be to lead the technology development team in designing and delivering the products the bus-dev folks dreamed up. Those first years were pretty difficult - we had a lot of resistance from ultra-conservative banker types who didn’t understand that we saw a revolution coming. And then the Boom happened. And what did every startup use to conduct business? That’s right, credit cards.
Our team went from pariah’s to golden children in a heartbeat. I went from leading a small team of code jedi to being a road warrior on the leading edge of every startup deal the company was involved with. As the team continued to grow, I took on the role of Chief Architect for the E-Commerce team. In addition to absorbing every new technology innovation under the sun, I also had to learn how to be a leader, diplomat, politician, project manager, salesman, accountant and strategist. That was a pretty rocky time, filled with lots of mistake learning opportunities.
After piling the whole Y2K industry crisis on top of the Net Boom, I was burned out and ready for a change. I parted ways with TSYS, and we packed up and moved back to Denver, ready to be home again
By the early 2000’s, most industries had a solid internet strategy and with the beginning of the end of the first web boom, I didn’t see a lot of innovation happening in most of the places I looked. Then, from my network of contacts I was introduced to a healthcare company called McKesson (actually McKesson/HBOC at the time). The management team in a small business unit was frustrated that the healthcare industry had still not adopted internet technologies and was looking for a Chief Architect to help pioneer their online strategy. I think I locked up the job when I said “Yeah, I’m sure we can use the web to deliver better healthcare. We probably can’t fix it, but we can definitely make healthcare suck less.”
We make healthcare suck less became our unofficial motto. Again, in a matter of right place/right time, I grew from being responsibile for managing the technical architecture of four products to over a dozen as the business unit grew into an entire division. We designed systems that won some of the largest government healthcare contracts in history. The penalties for being successful were painful as politics, meetings and administrivia began to consume all of my time - leaving me no cycles for maintaining my technical edge. What this really meant was that I’d spend my nights and weekends hacking away at whatever caught my fancy.
Along the way, my two girls grew old enough that Patti was ready to do something besides be a stay at home mom. At first, she figured she’d start looking for a job. I was incredulous. Not that she wanted to go back to work, but with the idea that she would settle for taking a 9-5 job when she had the opportunity of a lifetime - actually, an opportunity few of us really see in our lifetimes. She could literally pursue whatever dream she wished and we could make it work. I challenged her to spend some time thinking about that and coming up with a gameplan. So, two years ago she opened a store in downtown Longmont called the Bead Lounge. The store has been wildly successful, attracting a dedicated community of artists and hobbyists.
Patti’s success with the Bead Lounge increasingly led me to think about what I really wanted to do with my career. At the end of the day, I still have that same sense of joy and wonderment for technology that I did when I was thirteen and I’m not really happy unless I’m building applications from new technologies that make people say “Whoa, that’s cool!”.
I recently realized that all of these experiences, how to lead innovation, managing relationships, business/finance, knowing your industries, have all prepared me to strike out on my own. As I recently posted, that’s exactly what I’ve decided to do. For those of you who’ve made it this far with me, stick around. I’m a late bloomer who is just now coming into his own. This is going to be great!
Now that we have a grounding on the theories, we can start applying them to our favorite disruptive social media ideas. My guess is each cool but struggling idea (like say, podcasting, vlogging, etc) is lacking in one or more of these critical factors:
