I Like to Make Cool Things
My boss at CNN Interactive — Harry Motro — asked me an innocuous question in my interview that I later decided was quite meaningful. In one sentence: what drives you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? I said: I like to make cool things. He hired me. I’ve been thinking about that answer for thirty years. What I meant at the time was mostly technology. This was 1995. The web was new enough that building anything on it felt inherently cool — you were doing something that had never existed before, for an audience that was discovering a new medium in real time. We launched CNN.com. We produced the first commercial internet video webcast. We built things on infrastructure that barely existed using tools we half-invented as we went. The technology was the cool thing. ...