I always knew that I was an engineer and entrepreneur ever since I was a child, I just didn’t know that was a vocation or profession until I stumbled well into my 20’s.
I was just one of those kids. I had to take things apart. I just had to know how they worked. I was 8 years old the first time I saw a computer. I could see that pressing the “H” key made a letter “H” print out, but when I opened the case I saw only integrated circuits and no mechanical hints to reveal the inner workings. I just stopped and starred. I could not for the life of me, even imagine how this digital computer device worked. I was transfixed. This one single experience revealed to me the most exciting, complicated and magical thing I had ever seen. I just had to know how it worked.
That was the day I became a computer scientist, I just didn’t know it yet.
As a faculty child, I had access to MIT computer labs where I learned to solder computer chips and write code in low-level assembly language. I wrote Logo programs to control mechanical “Turtles” at the legendary labs of computer visionaries, Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky. This provided more than a lifetime of inspiration, but I had no notion that I could ever have a job doing such things.
Around the time I turned 20 years old, I moved to the city of Seattle and found myself building computers in my apartment and carrying them downtown on the bus. I worked days as a technician at IBM to pay the bills, but in my mind I was already dedicated to a new computer platform and that was just about all I could think about.
It was at that very same time, I met my first entrepreneurial mentor, Peggy Thompson. We started a software publishing company in Seattle’s famous Pike Place Public Market where we did some amazing things together. We created the world’s first printed magazine to include a CD-ROM (pre-world wide web) catalog of encrypted software, some 15 years before the iPhone AppStore. Other NeXT programmers were creating fascinating software at the same time, like the very first Web Browser written by Tim Berners-Lee which I still have on my old NeXT computer.
Our software store was revolutionary, and I had a chance to demonstrate it personally to Steve Jobs who famously studied my demo and when I was done, pointed to me with the clasped hands of a thoughtful guru and said only the words “I like it”. However short a response, those three words turned out to be quite a boon for us. The demo drew attention from senior industry professionals and I was the toast of the trade show that year for sure.
After moving to Silicon Valley in the 1990’s I was engaged at a whole series of dot-com companies during startup and acquisition, before founding my own Social Software company in 2001.
Today, I’m still an entrepreneur and I’m still a computer scientist and again, I’m compelled to dedicate myself to another new computer platform. The iPhone. The iPhone is my next adventure, and it is the first personal computer I can finally hold in my hand. There’s a lot of really interesting things to be invented, so I gotta go!
