Can you put your life into bullet points? Can you summarize and really boil information spanning decades down to its essentials? Let’s give it a try.
- Act I (Growing up)
- Born outside NYC in the foresty suburbs
- Was pretty bad at school, but I read non stop
- Got into Art pretty early. Loved to draw
- Went to a local community college and then a bad state school
- Learned a little about myself
- Act II (the dot come hurricane)
- Got my first job as a secretary at Sony and completely automated myself out of the position in 8 months.
- Started a digital agency in NYC
- Grew the company up to 35 people and 5 MM in revenue
- Designed and built Hotkoko, a SaaS precursor to Sharepoint
- Got married, produced kid
- Fired everyone after 9/11 and dotcom collapse. Learned alot about myself.
- Act III (new beginnings)
- Moved to California, more kids
- Learned IT administration (Exchange, Active Directory, etc)
- Learned Project Management (I am not that good at it)
- Found first job as Interaction Designer
- Worked a year at Intuit and learned testing from Avinash Kaushik. Spent the year innovating with jQuery.
- Act IV (design leader)
- Was first employee for Marketo, wore many hats:
- Product Management
- Research
- Product Design
- Product Marketing
- Sales Engineering
- Training
- Support
- Documentation
- There were years of joy and years of pain, but overall it was an exceptional experience. IPO 2012.
- Designed flagship system from scratch, built a great team, and secured two patents for marketing attribution.
- Was 8th employee of Engagio, led product management and product design. Designed several systems from scratch.
- Joined Treasure Data as head of product design
- Designed re-think of entire platform UX
- Built great team (favorite so far) and led innovative Figma design system.
- Was first employee for Marketo, wore many hats:
- Act V
- Wait, there is more? Nice! How many more acts do I get?
It doesn’t seem like much when I read it quickly, but there are alot of stories baked in. LinkedIn gives you a glimpse into someone’s history, but I wish it was a little less professional. I want to know the stories. I want to see the character development.
Each of you is a fascinating story. I wonder what will be in your next act?
Whatya think?